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Publications of the University of Virginia 
Phelps-Stokes Fellowship Papers 



Rural Land Ownership Among the 
Negroes of Virginia 

With Special Reference to Albemarle County 



BY 

SAMUEL T. BITTING 



1/iT-i 



LISS 
.73 

YsBi 



D. Of D. 
OCT 3 191? 



/» 



r' 



t^ 






FOREWORD. 

The present essay, which for simplicity has been divided into 
seven chapters, is the result of the writer's investigations during 
his incumbency of the Phelps-Stokes Fellowship at the Univer- 
sity of Virginia during the session of 1914-15. While the sub- 
ject is too great to be treated adequately in so limited a time it 
is hoped that the following pages may at least suggest the dif- 
ferences in economic condition between urban and rural negroes 
and eventually, perhaps, lead to an exhaustive study of the sub- 
ject. Like all social questions the negro problem must be an- 
alyzed under the special conditions of time and place before 
there can be any intelligent basis for action, and it was with 
the purpose of increasing the present inadequate fund of such 
knowledge that the present study was undertaken. 

My thanks for helpful advice on the ways and means of un- 
dertaking the study are especially due to Dr. Thos. W. Page, of 
the University of Virginia; Professor W. M. Hunley, of the 
Virginia Military Institute ; Dr. J. H. Dillard, Director of the 
Jeannes Fund, Charlottesville, Va. ; and Mr. D. Hiden Ramsey, 
of Asheville, N. C. ; and to Dr. Chas. W. Kent, of the Univer- 
sity of Virginia, who read the manuscript. Messrs. N. T. Mc- 
Mannaway, of Charlottesville ; P. T. Atkinson, of Hampden- 
Sidney ; B. E. Copenhaver, of Marion ; and R. A. Folkes, of 
Gloucester gave valuable information on school conditions which 
could not have been obtained from any other source and to 
that degree increase whatever value the present study may have. 

S. T. Bitting. 
New York City, 

November, ig 75. 



CONTENTS. 

Chapter I. 
Modern Agricultural Virginia ~ 

Chapter II. 
Freedom and Property Holding -- 

Chapter III. 
The Present Conditions 36 

Chapter IV. 
Negro Land Ownership in Albemarle County ^6 

Chapter V. 
Economic Conditions Among the Negroes in Albemarle 
County 67 

Chapter VI. 
Social Conditions °' 

Chapter VII. 
Reflections and Conclusions 98 

Appendix and Bibliography 104 



CHAPTER I. 
Modern Agricultural Virginia. 

The system of land tenure and the possibility of a large staple 
crop early determined the type of agricultural economy which 
was to become typical of Colonial Virginia. In response to 
the demand for cheap labor created by this large scale agricul- 
ture negro slavery was soon introduced into the commonwealth 
and became an organic part of the economic organization. For 
about two centuries this system prospered, but finally, when 
good land became scarce in the nineteenth century it weakened, 
and indeed all but gave way several decades before emancipa- 
tion actually occurred. But it did remain until the War, and 
the plantation was characteristic of agriculture in the Old Do- 
minion except in the Valley where small farms were the rule. 
The negro slaves were most numerous in the tobacco raising 
sections of the South side. With the War between the States 
and the abolition of slavery, however, it became apparent that a 
complete agricultural and industrial revolution had begun. 

At the close of the War Virginia found itself doubly handi- 
capped because not only had its economic organization been com- 
pletely overturned but its fields had been the scene of destruc- 
tive battles prohibiting for the time production of any sort. 
Thomas Nelson Page says : "The disorganization of the 
laboring class in Virginia and the condition of her transporta- 
tion facilities, coupled with universal lack of means at the time, 
almost destroyed her agriculture. * * The old planter 

system proved generally wholly unsuited to the new conditions 
and under the continued depression of agriculture, and such 
agricultural products as it had been the custom to raise in Vir- 
ginia, it almost entirely disappeared. When labor only gave a 
half-year's work for a full year's hire, only that man could af- 
ford to farm who was independent of labor. Thus, the old 
planter class gradually passed away, the young representatives 
of it going to the cities and seeking other fields of enterprise for 
application of their faculties, and their place has been taken by 



8 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

the small farmer who works at the plow himself or hires a few 
'hands' to work under his own eye." 1 And during the years 
that immediately followed the War it was the small farmer who 
suffered the least, for the planter, burdened with land, was 
unable to follow similar simple methods. Indeed, the complete 
prostration of the planting section of the State is almost beyond 
comprehension. Page says of this section: "It was not only 
that property values had been swept away, but that everything 
except the bare land from which property values can be cre- 
ated had been extirpated. The entire personal property of the 
state had been destroyed; the laboring class of a country de- 
pendent upon its agriculture had been suddenly changed from 
laborers into vagrants, with no property to make them conserva- 
tive and no authority to hold them in check. Their dependence 
was suddenly shifted from their former masters to strangers, 
whose indirect, if not their direct teaching was hostile to their 
former owners. The country was left overwhelmed with debt, 
with nothing remaining with which the debts could be paid." 2 
It was amid such conditions that the people of Virginia ad- 
dressed themselves to the new order. For a few years the old 
system in the tobacco counties survived by its inertia and the 
people went about planting on borrowed money. But such a 
system would have been unsnited to the new conditions under 
any circumstances, and under the conditions of the Reconstruc- 
tion Period every energy was paralyzed by exterior forces. The 
result was that Virginia and more especially that section of the 
state known as the "Black Belt," where conditions approximate 
those in the Gulf States, was withdrawn for several decades 
from the common movement of progress and the incubus of a 
body of homeless and helpless ex-slaves weighed on her heav- 
ilv. The effect of the changed conditions was, indeed, serious 
in direct proportion to the number of negroes; the greatest 
problem was presented in the Black Belt, while in the upper 
Piedmont Section adjustment was 'much easier, and in the 
Valley the evil consequences of the complete social and indus- 
trial upheaval were reduced to a minimum. 



1. Thos. Xelson Page. "The Old Dominion." 325-f 

2. Ibid. 320. 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP J 

At the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Ap- 
pomattox the soldiers of the Confederacy were allowed to "keep 
their horses." "They will need them," said General Grant, 
"when they get home for the spring plowing." The need was a 
crying one ; soldiers returned home after four long years to find 
their lands as war-worn as they themselves, and the horses 
which they rode were literally their only dependence for a new 
crop. But energy for the peaceful pursuits was not lacking, 
and in 1908 Page declared that there was scarcely a professional 
man in the state over the age of fifty who had not worked at 
the plough during the first few years after the war. There- 
fore, although to rebuild the state, was a long and difficult task 
and the people could not adapt themselves to the changed condi- 
tions in a day ; yet by the close of the last century the indus- 
trial revolution, so abruptly begun, had re-aligned the forces of 
production and real progress was well under way. 

"The economic emancipation of the average white man," a 
Southern writer has said, "was the greatest result of the de- 
struction of slave labor," 3 and Virginia's post-bellum progress 
in both agriculture and industry has amply illustrated this truth. 
With the downfall of the old regime capital was no longer needed 
to purchase labor, and the cheap lands enabled the poor man, 
after the immediate effects of the War were over, to become a 
land owner without difficulty. Such was the theory, and that 
it has been the actual condition is borne out by the fact that 
since the War the number of small farmers has steadily in- 
creased and the average size of farms decreased from 246 acres 
in 1870 to 118.6 in 1900. Because of the destruction of prop- 
erty, the loss of capital, and the almost universal bankruptcy 
the white sections of the state recuperated much more rapidly 
than did the black sections. In 1865 land in the plantation sec- 
tions was a drug on the market — the burden of cultivation and 
taxation was greater than could be borne by the bankrupt own- 
ers — ; and in this year this class of land sold at from one-fourth 
to one-tenth of the price that it commanded in 1860; indeed, it 



3. Walter L. Fleming, in "The South in the Building of the Na- 
tion," Vol. VI. 



10 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

could seldom be sold for any appreciable amount. 4 The whites 
in these sections, furthermore, had little faith in free negro la- 
bor. This opinion for some years seemed to be amply justified 
by the fact that negroes flocked to the cities without work and 
to the disease-ridden army camps in such numbers that DeBow 
estimated that one-fourth of the negro laborers died or were 
disabled in the first five years of freedom. When efforts were 
made to cope with the situation the Freedmen's Bureau inter- 
fered '•> and the general result was to retard those sections of 
the state where the negro population was densest. 

Today sections of Virginia in the Valley and the Southwest, 
where the negro population was always small, are among the 
richest and most prosperous agricultural districts in the entire 
country, and other districts in the same part of the state are 
destined to take their place in the same rank. But even the 
poorest section, finally recovered, has made rapid progress in 
the past two decades. A large portion of the old plantation 
section lying within the influence of the Chesapeake Bay has 
been found to be admirably adapted to truck farming, and now 
furnishes fruits and vegetables for the markets of the eastern 
cities several weeks before they can mature a hundred miles 
further inland. Another portion of the plantation region, the 
South Side, produces "bright" tobacco, which brings a far bet- 
ter price than that paid for common leaf : and in yet other por- 
tions new resources are being developed. Under the changed 
conditions the farmer has learned the value of land and labor 
as factors in production and this has taught him "where to take 
in and where to let out ;" he no longer confines himself to the 
staple crops and he raises more stock than he formerly did. 
And of equal importance is the more scientific basis of modern 
agriculture which not only increases production but makes the 
farm again attractive to the representatives of the old planting 
class. 

While it would be out of place here to go into the enormous 



4. Ibid. 

5. See Chap. II belov 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 11 

industrial strides that have been made in Virginia — and, for that 
matter, all over the South— since the Reconstruction Period, it 
will be well before going on to an outline of the present agri- 
cultural conditions to briefly call attention to Virginia's indus- 
trial resources. The improvement of transportation facilities 
in the eighties, and since that time, was the beginning of the 
new era. The railroads penetrated the forests and the timber 
proved a great field for new enterprise, while the trans-Appalach- 
ian railways, which were actually opened in 1882 under the di- 
rection of Major Jed Hotchkiss, made possible the development 
of the great coal fields and gave a stimulus to manufacturing. 
In 1907 the Pocahontas Fields (Virginia and West Virginia) 
produced 17,000,000 tons of coal whereas the second largest out- 
put, that of the Alabama fields, only totalled 14,500,000 tons. 
Other mineral deposits such as cement, gypsum, phosphate, etc., 
have likewise been extensively developed in recent years and 
have had a consequent effect upon industry. Under the stimu- 
lus of the factory new towns are now springing up, and in the 
older manufacturing towns, Richmond. Lynchburg, Roanoke, 
and others there has been a rapid increase in population. The 
general business revival which took place about 1880 was in 
itself of considerable aid to Virginia industry and the demand 
which it produced for Southern raw material increased the work- 
ing capital necessary for the establishment of factories, while 
Northern capital began to come South as understanding sup- 
planted misunderstanding. About this time, furthermore, the 
people began to see that if labor was to be honored it must be 
sufficiently diversified to accommodate the different aptitudes of 
classes and races and by 1880 the old Virginia factories had 
been placed on a firm foundation while their number and equip- 
ment was beginning to be rapidly increased by home and outside 
capital. 

Thomas Nelson Page sums up the recent progress : "The con- 
ditions have of late been changing. Virginia, instead of being, 



6. Article by E. W. Parker in "The South in the Building of the 
Nation," VI, 175. 



12 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

as the cant phrase went, - a good place to come from' has be- 
come once more a good place to come to. Her advantages of lo- 
cation and climate have ever been recognized, and of late other 
advantages also have been discovered. Her transportation facil- 
ities have been steadily improving, her mineral resources have 
attracted the attention of capital, and, being examined, have been 
found to be wonderful both in quantity and quality. Her coal 
produces the highest speed in the ocean racers and her iron 
brings the best prices at the Northern forges." 7 Or, as Chan- 
cellor J. H. Kirkland says of the South, "she is now sending 
iron to Pennsylvania and coal to Newcastle." 

TABLE I: VIRGINIA MANUFACTORIES. 

1899 1904 1909 

No. established 3,186 3,187 5,685 

Persons engaged S8.898 120,797 

Proprietors 3 < 643 6 ' 5T0 

Salaried empl's 3,828 4,970 8,551 

Wage earners 66,223 80,285 105,676 

Primary horsepower 136,696 176,998 283,928 

Capital $ 92,300,000 $147,989,000 $216,392,000 

Expenses $ 94,513.000 $130,870,990 $196,246,000 

Services $ 23,904,000' $ 32,818,000 $ 47,255.000 

Materials $ 59,359,000 $ 83,649,000 $125,583,000 

Miscellaneous $ 11,250,000 $ 14,403,000 $ 23,408,000 

Val. of Product $108,644,000 $148,857,000 $219,794,000 

Produced wealth $ 49,285,000 $ 65,208,000 $ 94,211,000 



The above table shows the development of manufactures in 
the state during the last census period. In the order of their 
importance the manufactured goods of Virginia are: timber 
products over thirty-five million dollars, tobacco over twenty- 
five millions, flour seventeen millions, car and shop work nine mil- 
lions, fertilizer eight millions, leather eight millions, and cotton 
goods seven millions. The value of the gross product, which 
was $220,000,000 in 1909 was in 1870 barely $38,000,000 and 



Thos. Nelson Page, "The Old Dominion," 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 13 

in 1880 about $52,000,000. 8 From these figures the progress of 
industry is apparent, but although these interests are important 
and varied, agriculture continues to be the principal producer of 
wealth and the occupation of the majority of the people. 

The State of Virginia is geographically divided into several 
sections, and since these divisions are closely related to the dif- 
ferent types of agriculture and negro population, it will be in- 
structive to note their natural differences. There are, in gen- 
eral, three principal divisions namely: Tidewater, Piedmont and 
Middle Virginia, and the Valley and the Southwest. 

Tidewater Virginia, or the Coastal Plain, comprises about one- 
fourth of the state, and stretches along the eastern side from the 
Chesapeake to the fall line of the Atlantic rivers. It consists 
altogether of low land while a considerable portion of it lying 
nearest the bay consists of marshes that are reached by the ocean 
tide. It is essentially an alluvial country and by reason of its soil 
and climate has been found to be particularly adapted to truck- 
ing. It is within twelve hours of 20,000,000 consumers and its 
small fruits and vegetables find a ready market in Baltimore, 
Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. The trade in strawberries, 
peanuts, and potatoes is especially large, and even ten years ago 
yielded annually over $12,000,000. 9 

Piedmont and Middle Virginia, which for the present pur- 
poses may be considered together, consist of the broad alluvial 
level and rolling lands west of the Tidewater. The principal 
products of Middle Virginia are corn, wheat, oats, hay and to- 
bacco. The tobacco raised on the South Side is that known as 
"Virginia leaf" and has a world-wide reputation for its excel- 
lence, while in Halifax, Pittsylvania, and Henry Counties the 
famous "bright" tobacco is raised. Near the eastern slopes of 
the Blue Ridge fruits of excellent quality are produced in con- 
siderable quantities. 

The Valley, the Southwest and the Appalachian region com- 
prise the balance of the state. The great Valley, as it is called, 
lies between the two mountain chains that extend throughout the 



8. Cf. Census Reports for respective dates. 

9. Virginia Handbook, 1907. 



14 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

state, and includes parts of the valleys of Shenendoah, James, 
Roanoke, Kanawha, and the Houston or Tennessee. Its princi- 
pal crops are fruits and cereals, and, in the Southwest, cattle — this 
section having the distinction of being the only exporter of fat- 
tened cattle direct from the pastures. 

Such, in brief, are the geographical divisions of the state and 
it is apparent that they afford great agricultural diversity. In 
his inaugural address ex-Governor Swanson said : 10 "No State 
in the Union has richer or more varied resources than Virginia. 
* * * In extreme Southside Virginia are seen great white 
fields of cotton, as rich in beauty and luxuriant in growth as can 
be found in North Carolina or Georgia. In Piedmont and South- 
ern Virginia are produced the great crops of tobacco 1 which 
largely contribute to the world's supply. The magnificent Valley 
of Virginia, raising great crops of wheat, corn, oats and hay, 
is almost unspeakable in her prodigality and production. The 
beautiful hilltops and mountains of Southwest and Northern Vir- 
ginia, with their spontaneous and perennial growth of blue grass, 
have browsing on them herds of cattle and sheep. * * * In 
eastern and Tidewater Virginia we have large truck farms and 
gardens, which furnish the vast population of the Eastern cities 
with their vegetables and foods. The profits of this industry are 
already immense, but the industry is still in its infancy and its 
possibilities for the future are immeasurable. Nowhere can 
fruit grow to greater perfection than in Virginia, and her great 
crops of apples, peaches, and grapes are bringing immense re- 
turns and have brighter promise for the future. There is not a 
farm product known to the temperate zone that can not be raised 
in the varied soil, climate and conditions of Virginia. Every- 
where in the state are seen evidences of intelligent and scientific 
farming, of progress and prosperity. The increase in farm prod- 
ucts and values in recent years has been striking and excelled 
by few states in the Union." These passages do not exaggerate 
when they point out the diversity of agricultural products. 

Certain figures derived from the last census may be of benefit 



10. Quoted from address of Feb. 1, 1906. 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 15 

in giving an idea of present agricultural conditions within the 
state. In the first place, according to the census, more than 
three-fourths of the entire area of the state is in farms, thus 
placing Virginia distinctly in the class of agricultural states. 
With the exception of fifteen counties — seven in the mountains 
and eight on the coast — the proportion of farm land to total 
area is three-fifths or more and of these eighty-five counties, 
eleven — Scott, Grayson, Carrol, Floyd, Franklin, Pittsylvania. 
Halifax, Caroline, King George, Clark, and Loudon — have over 
ninety per cent of their area in farms. 

The average value of farm lands for the whole state, accord- 
ing to the census, is $20.24 per acre, with an average value of 
less than $10 in thirteen counties and over $50 in five. More 
than half of the counties (58) show an average value of between 
$10 and $25 — these with those valued at less than $10 per acre 
occupy most of the South-central portion of the state which 
was formerly the Black Belt. Of the twenty-four counties val- 
ued at between $25 and $50, eight are in the Southwest, ten are 
in the Northern Neck, and the remaining six include Chester- 
field and five coast counties. 

During the last census period there was an increase of 16,132 
farms or 9.6%, coincident with an increase of 11.2% in the 
general population of the State. The average size of farms de- 
creased from 118.6 to 105.9 acres. The total value of farm 
property, which includes land, implement, livestock, buildings, 
and poultry was in 1910 $625,065,000 or 93.2% greater than 
in 1900. The value of land alone increased 96.7% as compared 
with increases of 93.6% in the value of buildings, 82.8% in im- 
plements, and 78.2% in stock. The average value of a farm, 
including its equipment, is $3,397, or an increase of 76.3% since 
1900. In Tennessee, a State comparable to Virginia, the in- 
crease in the value of farm property was 79%, as compared with 
Virginia's 93.2%." 

Tabulated, Virginia's progress in agriculture since 1870, when 
the immediate effects of the war were over, appears as follows: 



11. The decrease in the purchasing power of money makes all of 
these figures more apparent than real. 



16 



PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 





TABLE II: 


PROGRESS 


IN AGR 


ICULTURE 














Per ceni 
in last 




1870 


1880 


1890 


1900 


1910 decai 




1,225,163 


1,512,565 


1,655,980 


1,854,184 


2,061,612 11. 




73,849 


118,517* 


127,600 


167,886 


184,081 9f 


Land in farmst 


18,145,911 


19,835,785 


19.104.951 


19,907,883 


19.495.636 -2, 


Imp. land in farms 


8,165,040 


8,510,113 


9,125,545 


10,094,805 


9,807,058 -2. 


Acres per farm. . . 


245.7 


167.4 


149.7 


118.6 


105.9§-10. 


Value per farm... 


$2,666 


$2,088 


$2,308 


$1,927 


$3,397 7 


Total val. farms.. 


$196,906,040 $ 


247,476,536 $ 


294,488,569 


$325,515,977 


$625,065,383 93. 


Per cent, of farms 












operated by owners 




70.5% 


73.1% 


69.3% 


73.57o 


By tenants 




29.5% 


26.9 


30.7 


26.5 


Val. land and bldgs. 












per acre 


$9.39 


$10.89 


$13.32 


$13.64 


$27.29 100$ 



As shown by the table the increase in the value of farm prop- 
erty in forty years amounts to $428,159,000 of which $50,570,000 
is credited to the first decade, $47,012,000 to the second, 
$29,027,000 to the third, and over three hundred million to the 
last. All classes of farm property show increases for each decade 
which are in fact considerable, and only seem small when com- 
pared with those of the last. In 1870 the plantation, which had 
been the agricultural unit before the war, still existed to a con- 
siderable extent, and the attempt to continue the old methods 
accounts for the large farms of that year. During the last 
thirty years these large estates have been divided into smaller 
farms, and either sold or operated by tenants. 

The matter of land tenure is especially important when deal- 
ing with negro farmers, because in the lower South tenantry 
occupies the great majority of negro agricultural workers. In 
1910 the number of farms in Virginia was 184,018 and of the 



♦Note 60% inc. 1870-1880. 

tTotal land area of State, 25,767,680 acres. 

fit will be seen that more than a reasonable advance was made 
in the previous decade for an old farming country. 

§In Tennessee the average size farm is 81.5 acres, worth $23.98 
per acre. 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 17 

operators 133,664 are classed as owners, and 48,729 as tenants. 
Of the owners 15,700 rent additional acreage and of the tenants 
11,143 are cash, 1,208 share-cash, and 33A72 share. The bal- 
ance are not reported in the census. The number of tenants re- 
porting in 1910 represent a gain of 39.3% since 1880 but the 
gain has been fluctuating and there was a decrease of nearly 
3,000 between 1900 and 1910. The proportion of tenants to 
all farmers which was 29.5', , in 1880, was only 26.5% in 1910, 
this being the lowest proportion shown for any census. In 1910 
75.5% of all land in farms was operated by owners, (the es- 
timate includes part owners), 3.4% by managers, and 21.1%. by 
tenants, the percentage for owners being higher and that for 
tenants and managers lower than in 1900. 

TABLE III: TENURE OF FARMS. 

All 
190O 

Owners 6S% 

Managers 1.3$ 

Tenants 30. V, 

It is shown by the table that the proportion of land in farms 
operated by owners showed a slight increase among the white 
farmers and a decided increase among the negro farmers. 12 The 
average white farm in 1910 was 127 acres while the average 
negro farm was 46.5 % acres. The proportion of improved land 
to total farm land was slightly larger for the whites than for 
the negroes, being 50.8% in one case and 49.6%, in the other. 

As to the size of farms those between 50 and 99 acres con- 
stituted 21.8% of the total white farms and those between 100' 
and 174 acres and between 20 and 49 acres constituted 21.2% 
and 19.1% respectively; for the negroes, farms of 20 to 49 
acres constituted 34.2% while those of from 10 to 19 acres 
comprised 20.9% and ranked next in importance. Of farms op- 



farmers 


White 


farmers 


Negro 


farmers 


1910 


1900 


1910 


1900 


1910 


72.6" I 


71.2% 


74.6$ 


59.3% 


67$ 


.;>'. 




1.1% 


.5% 


.4% 


26.59! 


27.3% 


24.3% 


40.27c 


32.6' : 



12. Because, however, of the comparatively small number of ne- 
gro owners in 1900 this increase is not so real as it is apparent. 



IS PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

erated by negroes, 35.5% are less than 20 acres as compared 
with 16.6 r ; of those operated by white farmers. 

As to the crops, the war effected a radical change in the old 
staple crop of tobacco westward to Kentucky and Tennessee; 
and Virginia, as the table shows, has only recently entirely re- 
covered, although an increased consumption since 1870 has stim- 
ulated production. 

TABLE IV: TOBACCO PRODUCTION. 

1SG0 123.968,312 lbs. 

1870 37.086,364 " 

1880 79,988,868 " 

1890 48,522,655 " 

1900 122,884,900 " 

1910 132,979.390 " 

Virginia today, producing over 130 million pounds, ranks 
third among the tobacco producing states of the Union. Prior 
to the War the principal tobacco counties were Pittsylvania, 
Mecklenburg, Charlotte, and Albemarle and the plantations 
ranged from 100 to 500 acres while today tobacco farms range 
from 20 to 50 acres and none of the counties any longer rely 
solely on tobacco. Along with increased diversification and 
smaller farms, coupled with increased value of land and labor, 
goes more intensive cultivation. In 1880 Virginia raised 568 
pounds of tobacco to the acre, while in 1905 this average had 
1 een raised to 675 pounds, 13 a condition in part made possible 
by the high price of tobacco which put fertilizer within reach of 
the producer, but also in large measure due to the more scien- 
tific methods pursued in its production. 

The following table shows the extent of diversification of 
crops in l r >10. It should, however, be remembered that the 
acreage is a better index than either the amount or value of the 
crops, because of the varying seasons and the variations in value 
of crop. 



13. Article by Meyer Jacobson in "The South in the Building 
the Nation," VI, 69. 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 19 

TABLE V: AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS. 



Acres har- 


Amount 


Value 


vested* 






Corn over $28,000,000 "| 






Wheat over $8,000,000 I 2,841,114 


50.283,074 bu. 


$39,993,929 


Oats over $1,000,000 J 






Peanuts 162,180 


4,381,413 bu. 


4.430,384 






S0.562 


Hay and Forage 773,577 


823,382 tons 


10,256,998 


Potatoes 86,027 


8,779.778 bu. 


5,667,557 


Sweets 40,838 


5,270,202 bu. 


2.6S1.472 


Tobacco 1 85,427 


132,979,390 lbs. 


12 169 0S6 


Cotton 25.147 


10.480 bales 
5,240 tons 


695 721 


Cotton Seed 


126.546 


Sugar Crops 8,308 




224,094 


Miscel. Vegetables 124,350 




8.989,467 






123,029 


Nursery Products 




522.480 


Small Fruits 




671.843 




3.770.491 


Maple Sugar & Sugar.... 




12.223 






10,118,851 






Total 


. $100,531,157 




$ 58,701,743 



*A11 farms not reported. 

Corn remains almost a universal crop, but it is often alter- 
nated with wheat. The average value per acre for corn in Vir- 
ginia in 1906 was $11.55 14 or a little more than that of Iowa 
and the same as that for Indiana. Peanuts, which are along 
with cotton seed, a totally new money crop since the War, form 
with this staple a large part of the state's agricultural wealth. 
Before the War corn and tobacco were practically the only crops 
and today we find a diversity excelled in but very few of the 
states. In the matter of vegetables alone the production in- 
creased between 1890 and 1900 something like 450%, the av- 
erage production of vegetables per acre being in excess of that 
in Ohio, where a large urban population creates a greater local 



14. Year Rook of State Dept. of Agriculture (Unit',), 



20 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

demand for truck garden products. Among the cereals corn 
ranks first, representing two thirds of the acreage and five sev- 
enths of the total value. Since 1880 the corn acreage has in- 
creased slightly while oats have decreased and wheat has re- 
mained practically the same. 

Statistics are not always convincing, but where they are so 
striking as those which show the progress of Virginia in indus- 
try, commerce, agriculture, and the other sources of wealth, it 
is at once apparent that the Old Dominion is rapidly restoring 
its wealth and building up its waste places. It is no longer de- 
pendent upon negro labor — though for many purposes it is still 
preferred — and the farmers have shown their ability to practice 
diversification and concentration. With the industrial advances, 
furthermore, the vocations of the people are becoming more di- 
versified ; the professional men of ante-bellum days are entering 
industry, commerce, and finance and, applying their talents, are 
increasing production. 

These changed economic conditions, which afford wider and 
more varied opportunities for earning a livelihood, have an im- 
portant bearing upon race relations and it is only in the light 
of actual present day conditions that they can be intelligently 
considered. In Virginia, where the contact between the races 
has been intimate, the negro problem was never so serious as 
in the Gulf States where the proportion of negro population is 
greater and where the negroes work largely as field hands with- 
out coming into direct contact with the whites. Under the new 
order of things, however, the inter-racial relations have been 
altered and the negro's wider field of economic activity has al- 
tered his status. 

As would normally be expected, the great economic changes 
which have taken place within the last few decades have af- 
fected the employment of the negroes. The ratio between black 
and white population is, to be sure, considerably smaller than 
it was immediately after the War, and the ratio of negro farm 
workers would naturally be smaller, but in addition to this the 
small farm movement, where less hired help is required, has 
tended to take away the employment of many negroes. That 
there is no excessive supply of negro labor as a result of this, 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP -1 

however, seems to be shown by the fact that there has been 
no decrease in the rate of wages but rather a steady increase 
too great to be accounted for by the decreased purchasing power 
of money. Many of the negroes have entered transportation, 15 
many more have entered mining, and still others are occupied 
in the new callings in the cities. Of recent years the number 
of negro artisans in the state has been decreasing and the 
industrial revival has not found it practicable to use negro la- 
borers as factory operatives (except in the tobacco factories), 
but they have entered the allied industries of transportation, min- 
ing, and lumbering in large numbers. Thus while negroes are 
not employed directly as a result of the increased number of 
factories, the wider industrial development has increased the 
number of vocations which they may enter. 

In spite of these new vocations, however, the city negroes 
have not increased any faster, relatively, than have the rural 
negroes and many have remained in the agricultural pursuits. 
In the country they have, from their profits as renters or from 
their savings as laborers, gradually begun to acquire property 
and the rapidity with which their rural holdings have increased 
in the past twenty years has been nothing short of remarkable. 
It is the negroes who have remained in the country, rather than 
those who have sought uncertain employment in the cities, who 
have made the most rapid progress in acquiring property and 
economic stability. 



15. See below, p. 



CHAPTER II. 
Freedom and Property Holding. 

It has been briefly shown how completely prostrated was ag- 
riculture immediately after and for several years following the 
War between the States and how the new industrial organization 
gradually evolved after the incubus of slavery was removed. 
But adaptation to the new conditions was no easy process and 
the negroes, freed overnight, were more at a loss, under the new 
conditions, than were any other classes of society. Their one 
valuable asset was the training which they had received in slav- 
ery and many of them took advantage of this to enter agriculture 
and the semi-skilled trades. There were many forces, however, 
in the years that followed the War which, taken with the negro's 
inborn traits, tended to keep matters unsettled and postpone eco- 
nomic adjustment. The natives of West Central Africa lived 
under conditions of tropical plenty where wild fruits were in 
abundance and easy cultivation made large returns for slight 
labor. There was, therefore, nothing in the environment under 
which the negro's racial characteristics were determined to create 
industrial capacity and when he was taken from his native land 
he was not only untrained but he was organically lacking in 
energy, industry, and providence, qualities which seem more apt 
to occur in the peoples of the North temperate zone. 

When the negro was taken into slavery there were many 
changes in all of the conditions of his life, but the greatest 
of these was that, for the first time in his history, he was forced 
to work. During slavery the negroes were given a very com- 
plete knowledge of the trades and industries which lie at the 
basis of civilization and, in the opinion of the most capable leader 
which the race has so far produced, it was the salvation of the 
race in America, because "every large plantation in the South 
was, in a limited sense, an industrial school." 1 And in the opin- 



1. Washington, "The Future of the American Negro," 54. 

22 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 23 

ion of Dr. H. B. Frissell, the principal of Hampton, "The South- 
ern plantation was really a great trade school where the slaves 
received instruction in mechanical arts, in agriculture, in cooking, 
sewing and other domestic occupations. Although it may be 
said that all this instruction was given from selfish motives, yet 
the fact remains that the slaves on many plantations had good 
industrial training, and all honor is due to the conscientious men 
and still more to the noble women of the South who in slavery 
times helped to prepare the way for the better days that were to 
come." - 

In Virginia, furthermore, there was a factor which tended to 
improve the negro organically. With the decline of the large 
plantations in the early part of the 19th century the demand for 
slaves decreased and after this time the state was largely engaged 
in selling slaves to the far South. Few negroes were imported 
into Virginia in the last hundred years of slavery, and the conse- 
quent process of weeding out or artificial selection produced a 
superior quality of negroes in the state — as indeed it did in the 
other border states. To indicate the character of the negroes sold 
from the border states, Bracket gives a quotation from a Balti- 
more newspaper advertising some good negroes to be "exchanged 
for servants suitable for the South with bad characters." 3 The 
result of this selection and the better training, made possible by 
the more intimate relations between master and servant in Vir- 
ginia, was to improve very materially the quality of the negroes 
within the state. 

At the beginning of the War, broadly speaking, four classes 
of slaves had evolved. The highest rank was that of sub-over- 
seer. On many of the Virginia plantations trusted slaves often 
took the place of paid white overseers, and that this was pos- 
sible shows to what an extent the fittest of the African popula- 
tion had acquired industrial qualities under slavery. Next stood 
the domestic servants for which the brightest and quickest were 
picked, and who constituted a much envied class among the ne- 



2. Quoted in Kelsey, "The Negro Farmer." 

3. Bracket, "The Negro in Maryland." quoted by Kelsey, "The 
Negro Farmer." 



24 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

groes by reason of the exceptional advantages afforded by con- 
tact with the whites. Below this group were the semi-skilled 
artisans who were the plantation cobblers, carpenters, smiths, 
etc. The lowest grade, a class composed of left-overs, was that 
of the field hands. In the cotton raising states it was this class 
which predominated, while in Virginia, where agriculture had 
already advanced beyond this stage, the upper classes were much 
more numerous. 

When the slaves were freed, therefore, the Virginia negroes 
had the advantage over their Southern brethren in both training 
and inheritance. Still, however, certain racial traits were pres- 
ent, and so long as the laws of inheritance hold true they will 
remain to a greater or less degree. Aside from mental capacity, 
these traits may, for purposes of analysis, be divided into four 
principal classes. First is the lack of purpose. Booker Wash- 
ington said that an "element of weakness which shows itself in 
the present stage of the civilization of the negro is his lack of 
ability to form a purpose and stick to it through a series of 
years."' 4 Indeed, it is this very lack of resolve that has, so far 
back as history goes, made the negro an ideal slave. Again we 
find carelessness, which includes indifference and lack of atten- 
tion, which makes him accept a mean lot with no ambition to 
rise above it. A third characteristic which has materially re- 
tarded the progress of the negro since his emancipation, and 
which was indeed a certain handicap to him during slavery, is 
improvidence. There was nothing in either the environment of 
Africa or that of slavery to develop thrift and economy and 
that they are lacking is to be expected, but the fact remains that 
they are qualities necessary for modern economic efficiency. "It 
may be asserted without overstatement," says a careful ob- 
server, 5 "that his inclination to gratify his tastes in those ways 
that money allows is only circumscribed by the limitation put 
upon his freedom of purchase." Wastefulness and destructive- 
ness form the final class of these traits which are organically 
present in the negro. Examples of these traits are to be found 



4. Washington, "The Future of the American Xegro.'' 

5. Bruce, "The Plantation Negro as a Free Man," 195. 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 25 

wherever the negro is employed unless by careful training he 
has overcome them. 

It is with these handicaps that the negro has entered free 
economic competition. They are innate and were not changed 
by emancipation. "An overwhelming majority of the race in 
its new struggle for existence under the exacting conditions of 
American industry," says Tillinghast. who has made a careful 
study of the economic heritage of the race, "is seriously handi- 
capped by inherited characteristics. Economic freedom has not 
developed a sense of responsibility and a persistent ambition to 
rise in energy, purpose, and stability; they are giving way before 
the whites in the skilled and better paid occupations ; and they 
fail to husband resources so as to establish economic safety." 6 

In spite of these deficiencies, however, the negro has since his 
freedom made remarkable progress in acquiring property. The 
explanation seems to lie in the fact that by entering agriculture 
the negro is putting to use what he learned best in slavery, and 
that in rural pursuits he comes into less intimate competition 
with the whites and in so far as he does compete with them his 
lower standard of living to some extent counterbalances his in- 
ferior efficiency. He did not begin to acquire land, however, to 
any appreciable extent until after the disturbing influences of 
the Reconstruction Period had passed over. 

Because of the "general disposition on the part of the negro 
to move at least once a year, the love of hunting, fishing, church 
and circus going, and other amusements which took him from 
his work" 7 the average white placed but little dependence upon 
free negro labor after the War. Accordingly the most impor- 
tant question before the Southern legislatures in 1865 was that 
of the ex-slave; he must work, obey the laws, abandon his va- 
grant habits and in general become responsible for himself and 
to society. To assist in bringing about this end the so-called 
Black Codes were passed in several of the Southern States, not- 
ably Louisiana, South Carolina, and Mississippi, which paved 
the way for what it was thought would be a general Southern 



6. 1. A. Tillinghast, "The Negro in Africa and America." Annals 
of the American Economic Association, May, 1902. 

7. Flemming in "The South in the Building of the Nation," IV, 448. 



26 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

system of apprenticeship. "To the Southern lawmaker," says 
Woodrow Wilson, "such restraints and compulsions seemed to 
be demanded by ordinary prudence for the control and at least 
temporary discipline of a race so recently slaves, and therefore 
so unfit to exercise their new liberty, even with advantage to 
themselves, without some checks put upon them." s 

But to Congress they were plain and wilful violations of the 
negro's freedom and their execution was suspended by the "Bu- 
reau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands." However 
praiseworthy may have been the intent of those who planned 
the work of this bureau, it is the opinion of unbiased observers 
that it was disturbing to the working of natural economic laws 
because it interfered between master and former slave. John 
Minor Botts, a Virginian Unionist, writing in 1866 said of the 
bureau: "I think that one of the greatest difficulties in Virginia 
in regard to the colored people arises from the organization of the 
Freedmen's bureau. * * * I have heard of a great many diffi- 
culties and outrages which have proceeded from the 
ignorance and fanaticism of persons connected with the Freed- 
men's Bureau, who do not understand anything of the true re- 
lation of the original master to the slave, and who have in many 
instances, held out promises and inducements which can never 
be realized iby the negroes, which have made them entirely in- 
different to work and sometimes ill-behaved." '■' In the same 
year Stephen Powers, correspondent to the Cincinnati Com- 
mercial and a Northerner by birth, after expressing his approval 
of the general purpose of the bureau criticised its organization 
as follows : "In many cases it has fallen into the hands of 
incompetent and speculating officers, who made it a by-word and 
unnecessarily obnoxious to the people of the State where it was 
located." 10 The effect of all of this was to demoralize the labor- 
ing force and thus hinder the progress of both the white farmer 
and the freed slave. Writing in 1865 Carl Shurz, expressed the 
situation well when he said : "The true nature of the difficulties 



8. Woodrow Wilson, "Division and Reunion," 261. 

9. Flenrming, "Documentary History of the Reconstruction," 365. 

10. Ibid., 365. 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 27 

of the situation is this : the general government of the republic 
has, by proclaiming the emancipation of the slaves, commenced 
a great social revolution in the South, but has, as yet, not com- 
pleted it." u Conditions were not improved by the Reconstruc- 
tion Act which was passed in 1867 and which divided the seced- 
ing states into military districts. 

When it was found, therefore, that the regulations to control 
the plantation labor could not be enforced, a new system of ag- 
ricultural economy had to be resorted to which, while never as 
important in Virginia as in the far South occupied, and still oc- 
cupies, many of the negroes. It was the metayage or share sys- 
tem, which economists usually consider a poor form of agricul- 
tural organization, but which was about the only practicable one 
at the time, because the lack of capital and the disorganization 
of the laboring force prohibited the sale of the plantations so 
that if they were to be cultivated at all they had to be rented out 
in small parcels. In 1880, 21,594 of the 118,517 farms in Vir- 
ginia were rented on shares, while 13,392 were rented for fixed 
money rentals. The census does not distinguish between the 
races, but it is probable that most of the "croppers" and a large 
proportion of the "renters" were negroes. By this time several 
variations of the system had been evolved. 12 

The old tobacco and cotton plantations on the South Side, 
where the effects of the War were most serious, were the prin- 
cipal ones to resort to this system and here, indeed, it still con- 
tinues to a very appreciable extent. But this form of agricul- 
tural organization took up fewer of the negroes in Virginia than 
it did further South, and in the other sections of the state the 
bulk of them continued to work for wages ; for the unreliable 
could find no other form of employment, and many of the best 
of them preferred to work for wages paid at the end of each 
week or month. The planters who were not forced by financial 
difficulties to pursue some other method kept their old negroes 



11. Shurz, "An Impartial View." 

12. For a good description of the variations of the metayage sys- 
tem see an article by Flemming in "The South in the Building of 
the Nation," Vol. VI. 



28 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

with them and paid them wages until parts of the plantations 
were sold off. These negroes worked under supervision and 
received from $5 per month immediately after the War 13 to $8 
or $10, a decade later, 14 and were "found," i. e. furnished with 
rations. The regular laborers and the croppers were usually 
given a house, a garden, poultry, pasture and other privileges 
which, as is the case with the modern "service basket,'' tended to 
increase the real wages to a point considerably higher than the 
nominal wages. In the opinion of many writers these numerous 
privileges which afforded the necessities of life were, indeed, 
one of the principal causes for the inefficiency of both the crop- 
pers and laborers of the period, and in so far as they removed 
the incentive for economic exertion this is undoubtedly true. 

The sudden emancipation of the negro and the consequent de- 
moralization of the working force was, in short, a serious handi- 
cap to the negro himself as well as to the industries of the state. 
During the Reconstruction Period the negroes were deluded with 
the idea that they were the wards of the Federal Government ; 15 
they were led to expect "forty acres and a mule" as a gift from 
Washington, and the sense of political importance which they 
acquired did much to demoralize them as agricultural laborers, 
and is in part responsible for the fact that in 1870 negroes com- 
prised 45.2% of the urban population of the state. The same 
influence fostered their innate characteristic of improvidence, 
and those who did acquire small tracts of land, either as orna- 
ments or as means to economic independence, were apt to be 
prevented from accumulating by a parasitic following of kin. 
As long as these influences were present the white counties of 
the state benefited in contrast with the black, and it was not 
until the negro had settled down to the new conditions that the 
latter could again begin to prosper. 



13. Godkin, "The South as It Is" in Hart's "American History 
Told by Contemporaries," IV. 450. 

14. Bruce. "The Plantation Negro as a Free Man," 197. 

15. Godkin asserts that "The very large majority of those claiming 
to be destitute might easily support life without taxing the charity 
of the government." "The South as It Is" in Hart's "American 
History Told by Contemporaries," VI, 449. 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 29 

Virginia was re-admitted to the Union in 1S70, and this was 
the beginning of the new adjustment. In 1878 President Hayes 
withdrew the troops from the South, and at this time negro rule 
under unprincipled adventurers came to an end and the "natural, 
inevitable ascendency of the whites, the responsible class, was 
established." 1G Now, with the external influences withdrawn, 
the economic forces which had been gathering strength for the 
future were unhampered and the result was the rise of industry 
and a general re-shifting of labor. Negroes were prohibited 
by their inefficiency from entering the new industries except to 
a very limited extent, but as we have seen, they entered some of 
the allied trades in considerable numbers and about this time 
began to acquire land. 

The total value of farming lands in the South declined 48% 
between 1860 and 1870, 17 which, of course, put rural lands at a 
price advantageous to prospective buyers until affairs were back 
in their normal condition in the eighties. Bruce declares that 
during this period the negro laborers were perhaps "in receipt 
of more money (in the form of wages) than any other class 
of the community; and if they had saved even a portion of their 
earnings it could have been invested to the greatest advantage in 
the land, which the revolution in the general economic system, 
produced by the civil war, threw upon the market. * * 

There were few owners of estates off the watercourses who 
would not have consented to sell many acres, in order to contract 
the size of properties that had always been too large, as well as 
to obtain cash ; and yet such opportunities of improving their 
condition at the very time that these opportunities have been fair- 
est have not been utilized by the masses of the blacks, not be- 
cause they have failed to observe them, but because they have 
not had the qualities to provide the purchase money that was 
necessary." ls 

It is true that the negroes failed to take advantage of the cheap 
lands of the Reconstruction Period, but the reasons, it would 



16. Woodrow Wilson, "Division and Reunion," 273. 

17. Bogart, "Economic History of the United States," 314. 

18. Bruce. "The Plantation Xegro as a Free Man," 222. 



30 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

appear, are not so easily found as this would indicate. In the 
first place there were the disturbing influences which came from 
the outside. These forces, when taken together with the negro's 
natural traits of improvidence and carelessness, kept him from 
discovering his best move and from looking into the future. It 
has been asserted that by saving his earnings the negro could 
have bought his "forty acres and a mule" during this period of 
depressed land values, but for a race of the negro's inherent 
qualities it was, indeed, more natural to expect that he should 
wait in the hope of receiving it as a gift. Beside such disturbing 
factors there was the dense ignorance of business transactions 
and economic values. Although they occasionally bought an 
acre or two the negroes had no conception whatever of the eco- 
nomic possibilities of land and their knowledge of business in 
general was practically nil. Furthermore, and of the greatest 
importance, is the fact that money was scarce. The negroes, just 
as the whites, did not buy land during this period for the very 
same reason that land was cheap. The poor whites did not begin 
to acquire land until after 1880 when the small farm movement 
began — they had missed the same opportunity to acquire cheap 
land, and largely for the same reason. Added to these factors is 
the natural contentedness of mind of the negro which makes 
him live in perfect happiness amid surroundings that would be 
revolting to more highly developed sensibilities. 

But. on the other hand, the negro had a more or less natural 
inclination, acquired during slavery, toward agriculture and when 
the obstacles were removed he began acquiring land at a remark- 
able rate. Statistics are not available, but from the testimony 
of people familiar with conditions at that time and from a few 
records derived from county books, the tide turned about 1880 
after economic conditions had again become fairly stable. The 
golden opportunity for the negro with respect to his securing 
valuable tracts, had indeed passed, but Bruce's prophecy, made 
twenty years after the war, that the negro would not acquire 
more property is not borne out by the facts. "An increase in 
the number of small white planters," he says, "will diminish the 
ability of the negro to buy estates, because such increase implies 
an advance in the price of land, upon which the prosperity of 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 31 

the white people must always rest. This will only render it more 
difficult than ever for the blacks to acquire it. If few were able 
to make purchases in the period of the greatest depression of 
prices, that is. in the course of the last two decades, the proba- 
bility is that still fewer will be able to do so in the future, on ac- 
count of the general rise in valuations that will attend an im- 
provement in the condition of the whites. So far as can be ob- 
served the race is not more economical after twenty years of 
freedom than it was after five, or even ten; and its habits are 
not likely to change with the progress of time." 19 

Probably if Virginia had remained solely an agricultural state 
this prediction would have been nearer true, but with the rise 
of industry twenty years after the war there occurred a general 
shifting of occupations, and since the greater efficiency of the 
white man forces the negro out wherever he cares to compete, 
this naturally determined the course of the negroes. Under nor- 
mal conditions they would have' turned to the land and this fact 
only aided them. The proportion of the total negro male popu- 
lation engaged in farming and agricultural pursuits increased 
from 50% to 51% between 18 f '0 and :1910, but there was a de- 
crease among the laborers and an increase among the owners. 
Those engaged as carpenters decreased in the same period from 
2,017 to 1,905; sawmill operatives from 2,541 to 695; tobacco 
factory operatives from 4,419 to 1,918; blacksmiths from 1,554 
to 1,005; railroad employees, however, increased during the 
same period from 7,648 to 9,029, and miners and quarrymen 
increased from 1,700 to 2,626. There was an actual increase of 
negroes engaged in agricultural pursuits of 19,357, thus their 
increase was both actual and relative to the increase in the total 
number of gainfully employed negro males. The whites in ag- 
riculture have decreased proportionately to their total population, 
being drawn away into factories, lumbering, milling, railroading, 
and other skilled occupations where the negro is largely excluded. 
In farming the competition is less severe, and consequently with 
this re-distributing of the population the negroes have again 
taken their place as agricultural workers and have of late years 



19. Ibid, 223. 



32 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

been increasing actually both as landowners and as laborers. 
Thus, in spite of the increase of small white farmers and the 
general rise in the value of land there has been a general increase 
in negro rural land ownership since 1880. 

That the negroes have, since the disturbing influences of the 
Reconstruction Period, made substantial progress in the acquisi- 
tion of title to land seems to be shown conclusively by the figures 
and that the rate of increase is progressive seems to be shown by 
a comparison of the figures taken from the 1900 and 1910 cen- 
suses. A computation of the rates of increase in land ownership 
for the two races gives results which are startling and which have 
been made the basis of various papers illustrating the great prog- 
ress of the negro over the whites in acquiring land, but which 
commendable as is the real progress, have been misleading. To 
illustrate, let us say that in a given community there are five 
thousand people of each race. Twenty of the negroes are land- 
holders, and two thousand of the whites are landholders. Now, 
if during a given period the actual increase of negro farmers is 
forty, the rate of increase is 200% and if there is an increase 
of one hundred white owners, the rate is 5<fc ■ That this is mis- 
leading is obvious, but the same methods of calculation have 
characterized many recent papers on the subject of negro prog- 
ress. For this reason the following tables and those elsewhere 
in this paper include the absolute as well as the relative figures, 
which, while hardly as miraculous, show a substantial progress, 
and one of which the race can well afford to be proud. 

TABLE VI: NEGRO FARMS AND ACREAGE. 



Per cent. Per cent. 

1900 1910 of total increase 

Negro farms 44,834 48,114 7.3% 

Owned 26,566 32,228 •',:' 21.3 

Rented* 18,030 15,886 33% — 14.6% 

Number acres 2,329,118 2,238,220 —.5% 

Owned 1,031,331 1,381,223 61.7% 1.8 

Rented 1,197,787 856,997 38.3% —29.5% 

Average size 49.7 46.5 — 6 .'.'' I 

Owned 42.9 

Rented 53.9 

*1S0 managers operate farms averaging 150 acres each. 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 3o 

The figures for the white farmers show an increase of from 
87,598 in 1900 to 101,436 in 1910 or 10.4%, with a total increase 
in white population of 16.5%. For negroes the reverse tendency 
is true, farmers increased faster than population, the respective 
figures being 7.3f and 1.6%. In some of the counties we find 
this even more true than in the state in general as is shown by 
the following table : 

TABLE VII: RATIOS OF FARM AND POPULATION IN- 
CREASE. 

Excess of 

County Negro pop. Negro farms farm rate 

Gloucester 11.8 decrease 1.6 decrease 10.2% 

Middlesex 2.1 increase 11.6 increase 9.5 

Albemarle 6.9 decrease 4.5 decrease 2.4 

Prince Edward 15.5 decrease 12. decrease 3.5 

Warwick 16.2 increase 171. increase 154. S 

Princess Anne 2.3 increase 9. increase 6.7 

The case of Warwick county is an apt illustration of the dan- 
ger of rates of increase, — here practically all of the negro prop- 
erty has been acquired recently, and although it is of a smaller 
amount than that in Albemarle it appears to a very much greater 
advantage. 'But nevertheless the figures are significant because 
they show that in these counties, which are fairly typical of the 
Tidewater and Piedmont sections, while in some instances both 
the population and number of farmers are decreasing, there is 
always an increase in the ratio of farmers to total population. 
For the state as a whole negro farmers increased 4.56 times as 
fast as their total population, while white farmers increased only 
.63 times as fast as their population. The ratio is as 1 to 72. 
These figures are important, not as showing that the negroes are 
making greater progress in this direction than are the whites, but 
as showing that they are overcoming their shortage as farm own- 
ers. In 1910 they constituted 24.8 per cent, of the farm owners 
of the state, while their population was 32.6% of total. It is 
reasonable to expect, however, that at the present rate of in- 
crease the number of negro farms will soon occupy a ratio pro- 
portionate to their population. 

—3 



34 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

TABLE VIII: VALUE OF FARMS. 



Negro farms 1900 

Value land $14,481,710 

Value buildings 5,550,740 

Value implements 931,280 

Value stock and poultry ::,C15,2S6 

Total value farm property 24.529,016 

Value per acre 6.50 

Value per farm 547 



1910 


increase 


$32,553,640 


124.8 


12,070,864 


128.3 


1,852,503 


98.6 


7,671,900 


112.5 


54.748,907 


123.2 


14.54 


123.7 


1,138 


108. 



The value of land for the whites increased from $186,133,370 
to $362,105,272; buildings, from $65,462,380 to $124,728,286; 
implements and machinery, from $8,979,760 to $16,263,380; stock 
from $38,411,451 to S67 ,219,538. There was an increase in the 
value of all white farm property of '0.7', while land increased 
from $10.53 to $20.98 per acre or 99.2% ■ The greater increase 
in the value of negro land is probably due to the fact that the 
negroes bought the cheapest land in sight, — marginal no-rent 
land, — which could not depreciate in value, while most of the 
property belonging to whites was subject both to depreciation 
and to appreciation. The increase in value of equipment is due 
to the fact that small farms normally have more improvements 
per acre and these the negroes have only acquired recently. 

TABLE IX: RELATIVE SIZE OF WHITE AND NEGRO 
FARMS, BOTH RENTED AND OWNED. 







Per cent. 


of 


Per cent, of 






White 


all w 


farm 


ers 


all 


n. farmers 


Total 


Under 3 acres 


183 




.1 






.5 


277 




.. 10,485 




7.6 






36.3 


17,464 


10 to 19 acres 

20 to 49 acres 

50 to 99 acres 


11,976 

25.925 
. . 29,657 




S.7 
19.1 
21.7 






20.8 
34.1 
IS. 


22,055 
42,390 
38,342 


100 to 174 acres. . . . 


.. 28,831 




21.2 






8.6 


32,997 




.. 13,893 




10.2 






2.6 


14,963 


260 to 499 acres 


.. 10,608 




7.8 






1.1 


11,138 


500 to 999 acres 


3,338 




2.4 






.2 


3.450 


1,000 and over 


974 




.7 






.03 


992 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 



35 




300 ^Oo ipo 

Acres. 



From the above figures and their graphical representation the 
great advantage of the white farmers in point of size of farms 
is apparent. The difference is due in part, however, to the fact 
that many of the large white holdings still survive in Virginia, 
in spite of the tendency, which has been seen from a previous 
table, for all farms to decrease rather than increase in acreage. 
The graph illustrates strikingly the two types of negro holdings : 
those which are large enough for real farms and those which 
make no pretense at being anything but rural homes. The negro 
holdings are apt to be of one class or the other and those half 
way between are, as the graph shows, relatively few in number. 



C H A P T E R I 1 1. 
The Present Conditions. 

In the preceding discussions the general status of agriculture 
in Virginia has been considered and we have entered, in some 
detail, into the matter of the acquisition of rural property by 
the negroes in the state. From this we may now pass to a brief 
survey of conditions among the rural, and especially land-own- 
ing negroes as they exist today in the several sections of the 
state. Conditions vary considerably, as will be seen, in the 
different sections of the state and must be considered geograph- 
ically if the study is to be of value ; the problem varies from 
neighborhood to neighborhood. "It is one thing in those re- 
gions of light and sandy soil where the farms of the white man 
and the negro adjoin, where the white man's farm is cultivated 
by his own labor, where the negro is not to any large extent a 
dependent class, and where the relation of master and servant 
exists but to a slight degree ; it is another thing where the ne- 
gro exists in large numbers as a working class upon the planta- 
tion of the white man." 1 

Among the negro rural inhabitants, other than the day la- 
borers, there are three distinct classes ; renters, farm owners, 
and owners of small rural tracts who have some other principal 
means of livelihood. Renters comprise about one-third of the 
negro farmers of the state and, as a class, are inferior to the 
owners. The obvious explanation is that by the very fact of 
being landowners this class has proven its superiority in self- 
control, prudence, and the other qualities which may lead to suc- 
cessful management. Many of the renters, on the other hand, 
are apt to be inferior even to the day laborers, since the free- 
dom of the position makes it one that is held in high esteem 
by the most worthless of the negroes. Renting is, in short, a 
retreat for the indolent, on the one hand, and an opportunity 



1. E. G. Murphy, "Problems of the Present South," 155 

36 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 37 

to make the initial steps to economic independence, on the other. 
Thus while the renting class contains many who, by thrift and 
industry, will gradually become free-holders, it is as a class in- 
ferior in stability and efficiency to the owners. The farm own- 
ers are apt to be of simpler tastes, regular, and more purposeful. 
After the War the class which first became landowners were 
those who had been sub-overseers on the plantations, and the 
training that they had had in bearing to some degree the weight 
of responsibility served them in good stead when emancipation 
threw them upon their own resources. Having been trained in 
simple standards of life they showed no inclination to waste 
their earnings and were thus able to save enough from their 
wages to purchase at low prices small tracts of land on the 
ridges that extend back from the water courses. The lowlands 
were held at a higher price and not even the more thrifty ne- 
groes could buy this land. The characteristic negro farm today 
is of thin soil and removed from the streams, but even this land 
with the aid of artificial manure is capable of raising a fine qual- 
itv of tobacco and very fair corn, and many of the negro tracts 
are in an excellent state of cultivation despite their inferiority. 
An occasional negro farm will be found consisting of a hundred 
acres or more all in good cultivation and as well equipped in 
the matter of outhouses, implements, and stock as those of their 
average white neighbors. 

The third class of the negro rural inhabitants, to which ref- 
erence has been made, own usually from two to ten acres with 
ordinarily not over three acres in cultivation and derive their 
principal means of support either by renting, farm laboring, or 
in some one of the various semi-skilled trades. In the Piedmont 
and Tidewater sections of the state considerable settlements of 
such negroes will be found at a distance of from two to four 
miles from many of the towns and smaller cities. It is not 
possible to state accurately, but from the statistics of size of 
holdings, it may reasonably be estimated that three-fourths of 
the negro free-holders are of this class. 

While all of the rural negroes, therefore, are not farmers in 
the strict sense of the word, there are many economic advan- 
tages which come to them that are not possible for their urban 



38 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

brethren. In the first place, and contrary to the facts in the 
cotton and rice districts of the far South, 2 practically all of these 
small freeholders raise a garden and cultivate for their own 
use corn, cabbage, snaps, onions, melons, and other vegetables. 
Many of them, also, have a few fruit trees and can some con- 
siderable amount of fruit for winter use. Most of the families, 
furthermore, keep a few chickens — albeit they are often of the 
"dunghill" variety — which help to diminish the cost of the daily 
menu, and by raising a few acres of corn they are enabled to 
keep a few head of stock, and a pig can be fed on the refuse 
from the table. That many of the negroes do take advantage 
of such economies is obvious to the most casual observer ; one 
negro informant told the writer that he netted an average of 
$10 per month by breeding a jack which he fed from his own 
little patch of corn. On the other hand, few negroes make the 
most of the opportunities afforded by a few acres of land. For 
instance, while it is not unusual to find a cow on a negro's place 
and the calves regularly sold, it is rare that they use milk and 
when butter is used at all it is a] it to be bought at the country 
store. It can not be said as true of the race, that they are 
inclined to take advantage of these economies. ' It is inherent 
in the character of the negro to fail to utilize those economies 
which make farming so profitable to the Chinese and Japanese 
in California and to the Italians in the South. A correlative 
characteristic is the negro's tendency toward extravagance which 
is well illustrated by the presence of various useless things in 
the homes. It would, indeed, seem that the limit of what they 
will buy is only determined by the extent of their credit. 

Tenants, and sometimes owners, in the tobacco regions usu- 
ally find it necessary to arrange for advances in food and cloth- 
ing at the country store until harvest. Money is seldom lent 
directly by the banks, but merchants, who are often also tobacco 
buyers, make such advances as are necessary and take a lien on 
the crop as security. In counties such as Albemarle, however, 
where agriculture is diversified and where the principle products 
are grain and stock this practice is reduced to a minimum and 



2. The same condition that is found in the far South is more or 
less true of the tobacco raising counties on the South Side. 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 39 

the operations are, as a rule, carried on on a strictly cash basis. 
The owners of rural property with some other principal means 
of support rarely ask for credit for more than a week's dura- 
tion and settlement is regularly made on Saturdays. Many of 
this class in Albemarle have said, with no small degree of pride, 
that they could have credit if so desired, but that it was better 
to "keep up." And then they have added that they have not 

borrowed "mo'an a quarter since Mr. died," or "when 

Mr. was living I used to borrow." The disadvantages 

of the crop lien system in the districts where the great staple 
is raised have often been fully discussed and it is not necessary 
to go into this subject here. 3 It is enough to say that in Vir- 
ginia, where more diversification occurs, this system which 
fosters the negro's natural tendency toward improvidence has 
been reduced to a minimum and, in many cases, by the negroes' 
own choice. The more fundamental cause, however, is the fact 
that the more frequent receipts from the sale of farm products 
or from wages renders it unnecessary for the merchant to ex- 
tend long time credit. Long credit is. on the other hand, in- 
herent in the agricultural system which depends on one great 
staple and this is one of its principal disadvantages. 

We have already called attention to the fact that the question 
of the welfare of the negro is a different proposition in each 
locality. Indeed, no question of sociology can be isolated from 
its environment of time and place and be stated in absolute and 
general terms without the danger of reaching erroneous conclu- 
sions. From these general considerations, then, let us pass to 
a brief discussion of the actual conditions as they are found in 
the three principal divisions of the state of Virginia. 

West of the Piedmont Section the negro population is rel- 
atively small and does not present any serious problem. In all 
of the counties west of the Blue Ridge there were in PXX) only 
61 ,939 4 negroes and in 1910 this number had been reduced to 
54,555, or 13.5%. They constituted, in this whole section, but 
10.5% of the total population, a proportion that is exceeded for 
the United States as a whole (10.7%) and by such states as 



3. See W. D. Weatherford. "Present Forces in Negro Progress." 

4. See appendix for tables of population by sections. 



40 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

Delaware, Maryland, Texas, Kentucky, and Tennessee which 
are not regarded as negro states. In some of the counties of 
this section the ratio of negro to total population falls as low 
as .03% (Buchanan), 2% (Bland), 1% ( Carroll ), .08% (Dick- 
enson), etc. From this it is apparent that in this section of the 
state where a different agricultural system was evolved in early 
times, the negro question is an entirely different one and the 
proportion is so small as to admit of an entirely different pro- 
gram. 

Negro farmers in this whole section totalled but 1,993 — or 
about one farmer to every 27 of the total negro population, a 
ratio which is hardly half of that in either the Piedmont or Tide- 
water sections. It is, of course, due to the fact that the negroes 
in this section who are not engaged in domestic service are either 
in mining or lumbering. But when we come to the individual 
farmer we find conditions here more favorable than in either 
of the other sections: in this section they owned 1,616, or 81%, 
of the 1.993 farms that they operated, a percentage ahead by 
about 15% of that in either of the other principal sections. Ac- 
cording to the most accurate estimate that can be made the to- 
tal value of their farm holdings in this section is $4,064,000 5 
or about $61.90 per acre for land and buildings, which is about 
double that in the Tidewater and more than double that in the 
Piedmont section. This fact is probably to be accounted for by 
the relative smallness of the negro holdings in this section which 
means that those who buy at all are apt to be of the best class. 
In this section in 1914 negroes owned 65,561 acres, or, in 32 
of the 100 counties negroes owned less than 4% of their total 
acreage in the state and but .8% of the total farm acreage in 
the section. It is a well known fact that the negroes make 
greater progress in sections where their proportion to the whites 
is small, 6 and this is borne out by conditions in this section. 



5. See Appendix for the derivation of this estimate. 

6. Careful investigations carried on by R. P. Brooks for Georgia 
show that the proportion of negro land-owners is greater where two- 
thirds of the population is white and smallest where two-thirds is 
black. "A Local Study of the Race Problem." Pol. Sc. Quar. June, 
1911. 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 41 

The same is true in many of the individual counties, where it is 
seen that the black districts tend to grow blacker and poorer, 
while when under the influence of the whites the negroes pro- 
gress better. 

In this section the smaller number of negroes in the rural 
population makes education for them more difficult but, generally 
speaking, the schools in this section are as good as elsewhere 
and they seem to be progressing. In Smythe County, which is 
typical of the Southwest, there is a school population of 6,143, 7 
of whom 5,813 are white and 330 are colored. The total num- 
ber of whites enrolled is 4,848 or 83% : and the total number 
of negroes is 22f> or 70 r ', . The small negro percentage is prob- 
ably to be explained here, as elsewhere, by the fact that few 
negro children above the age of fifteen attend. The average 
monthly salary for the negro teachers who manage the six 
schools in the county is $40 for males and $28 for females. 
Some of the negro schools in the county are aided by private 
subscription to continue for a longer term and the average term 
is seven months, which is only about two weeks less than that 
for the white schools. 

Turning, now, from a section where the negroes are already 
few and are growing less numerous to one where they form 
nearly half of the population and are increasing, it will be natural 
if we find conditions considerably different. In the thirty-three 
counties which were arbitrarily selected as the Tidewater Sec- 
tion s there were in 1900 some 221.367 negroes, and in 1910 
this number had increased to 221,387. In the latter year ne- 
groes comprised 49.4% of the population exclusive of the in- 
corporated cities and in some counties, such as Charles City, 
Caroline, Cumberland, Essex. Isle of Wight, Middlesex, etc., 
they comprised over half of the population. In this section, 
therefore, as far as the ratio of population is concerned, the 
race question reaches something like the same degree of com- 
plexity that it does in the Gulf states. There are, however, 



7. For these figures I am indebted to Mr. B. E. Copenhaver, Sup't 
of Schools for Smythe County. 

8. See tables in appendix. 



42 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

local conditions in the Tidewater which alter the situation and it 
is, rather, in the South Side of the Piedmont Section where con- 
ditions resemble those that have been described by Mr. A. .H 
Stone, W. E. B. DuBois, etc., in the lower South. 

In 1910 there were in this section 18,654 negro farms, 12,735 
or 68.1^-0 of which were operated by their owners, and there 
was one negro farmer to every twelve of total negro population. 
This is a proportion over twice as great as in the western part 
of the state. The negro owned acreage last year was 600,809 
or 11.5% of all the farm acreage in the section and the total 
value of all negro farm property was $18,056,000. 1 ' If we ac- 
cept the estimate that at the close of the war the negroes in 
this section owned 6,000 acres worth $90,000 lu remarkable prog- 
ress is shown. The average value of land and improvements 
per acre for negroes is about $30 which is about $5 less than 
the same average for the whites. The difference in land value, 
however, is probably considerably greater than this since on 
account of the relative smallness of negro holdings, the build- 
ings are worth more per acre than those of the whites. Actual 
conditions in this section can probably be best understood by 
studying some of the typical counties. 

Gloucester, in Eastern Virginia, has a population of 12,477 
of which 5,907, or nearly half, are negroes. In 1900 the ne- 
groes were in the majority. While this county has been se- 
lected as typical of the section it is, in some respects, a little 
better off than the others. In regard to illiteracy, for instance, 
the 1910 census shows 1,147 or 27.4% illiterates among the ne- 
groes, while in Hanover the same percentage is 33. The effect 
of communication with the outside world by water and early 
contact with the Hampton Institute account for Gloucester's ad- 
vantage over its neighboring counties in those qualities which 
have lead to material progress. But, on the whole, this county 
is typical of the more advanced counties of the section and what 
is said of it is applicable in little less degree to the others. 



9. See appendix. 

10. Walker, "Xegro Property Holding in Tidewater, Ya." 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 43 

In an interesting little study, 11 Thomas C. Walker estimates 
that at the close of the War there were 537 acres of land owned 
by the free negroes in Gloucester County. In 1880 "there were 
195 negroes who owned about 2,300 acres of land." The Audit- 
or's Report for 1912 shows a negro acreage of 19,772 acres, and 
by 1914 this number had increased to 20,292 assessed at about 
$145,000, and, with improvements, $270,000. Taking the ratio 
between assessed value and the value based on sales at about 
one-third this makes the real value about $800,9004 2 Prior to 
1880 says Walker, there were no buildings and improvements 
worth counting as most of them lived in log cabins, but at 
present they are worth some $350,000. 

The value of the negro farm lands in this county is increas- 
ing materially each year with the better knowledge of agricul- 
tural methods. Walker thinks that "the greatest agency em- 
ployed in the development of the Tidewater counties * * * 
in the education and material condition of the negroes is the 
Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute." For some forty- 
five years this school has been sending its graduates into these 
counties, and other parts of the state and the South, where they 
have, as a rule, cultivated industrial habits and desirable inter- 
racial relations. 

Another agency employed in the development of the soil is 
Hampton's cooperative demonstration farm work carried on 
with the United States Department of Agriculture under the 
supervision of J. B. Pierce, a Hampton graduate. In Glou- 
cester, however, as is the case in all but the tobacco counties, 
other means than farming exist to furnish a livelihood for the 
negroes, and there are few negro families some member of which 
does not spend part of his time fishing or oystering. The oyster- 
ing season lasts from September 1st to May 1st and good work- 
men often earn as much as $2 per day. According to a careful 
study of the negroes of Litwalton, 13 made some years ago, it 



11. T. C. Walker, "Xegro Property Holding in Tidewater. Va." 
Annals American Academy of Pol. and Sc. Science. Sept., 1913. 

12. See the Report of the Virginia Tax Commission. 1914. 

13. W. T. Thorn. "The Negroes of Litwalton. Va.," Bulletin De- 
partment of Labor. :;T. 



44 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

was found that the oystermen, i. e. those who dig the oysters 
from the rocks, make about $8 per month, while families occu- 
pied in shucking oysters can earn up to $400 per year, three- 
fourths of them getting less than $250. 

This industry has had a two-fold effect on the negroes of 
Gloucester and Lancaster Counties. In the first place it brings 
in a good deal of money, which seems to be invested in land, 
"and it is noticeable in that part of the county where the men 
are oystermen are the largest farms and the best homes owned 
by negroes." 14 But, on the other hand, it takes the men away 
from the crops too early in the fall and they return too late 
in the spring to get the best results from their farm work. An- 
other result has been that it caused scarcity of farm labor, and 
while negro labor still remains predominant in this section, there 
has been some white labor brought in. Although the average 
holding is something over ten acres, almost half are under this 
size and are commonly regarded as too small to furnish a living 
even under good cultivation, and the owners must either rent, 
oyster, or labor out on white farms. According to the observa- 
tions of Williams 15 both renting and the oystering industry are 
on the wane in Gloucester County, and in the future the bulk 
of the negro population will be engaged in peasant fanning and 
laboring on the white farms. This pronounced material im- 
provement among the negroes in Gloucester seems to be re- 
flected in the schools and other social agencies. 

According to the County Superintendent's books there was 
in Gloucester, in 1914, a school population of 3,946 lfi of whom 
1,806 were white and 2.140 negro. The total number of whites 
enrolled last session was 1,172 or 64% and the total number 
of blacks enrolled was 1.386, or 65%. For the 1,172 white chil- 
dren forty-seven schools were open and for the 1,386 negro 
children there were thirty-two school houses. The average 
monthly salary for white male teachers is $60 ; for white female, 



14. W. T. B. Williams, "Local Conditions among Negroes," bulle- 
tin published by the Hampton Institute Press. 

15. Ibid. 4. 

16. For these and the succeeding figures I am indebted to Mr. R. 
A. Folkes, Sup't of Schools of Gloucester Co. 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 



45 



$35; for negro male, $30; and for negro female, $27.50, which 
is higher than that usually paid the negro teachers. The length 
of the session for both white and negro schools is about seven 
months, but many of the negroes are forced to leave before the 
end of the session on account of farm work. All of the schools 
in the county, both white and black, are aided by private sub- 
scription to continue for a longer session. All of the negro 
schools are held in fairly well equipped frame buildings and there 
are many Hampton graduates and ex-students among the 
teachers. 

"The negro's opportunity to earn money and his superior 
average intelligence have led to the building of unusually good 
houses in Gloucester. In one of the better districts I found, 
in a school of thirty pupils, ten who lived in houses of six 
rooms each and only one in a house of one room. The log 
cabin is rare in Gloucester. These good houses have had ap- 
parently a marked influence upon the morals of the colored 
people. For instance, twenty-five years ago, when three-fourths 
of the people lived in cabins, bastardy was common. 17 A half- 
dozen cases among the colored people, and two, by the way, 
among the whites, in 1903 was regarded as an alarmingly high 
rate. In 1904 there was but one case among the negroes within 
a radius of ten miles from the court house. There is also but 
very little miscegenation. In a dozen school houses I saw only 
one child whose father was undoubtedly white. The criminal 
record of the county also reflects credit upon the homes. For 
instance, there were thirty arrests for misdemeanors in 1903. 
Of these sixteen were white and fourteen colored. In 1904 
there were fifteen — fourteen white and one colored. Of the 
felony cases for 1904 there were seven for the county — two 
white and five colored. This is said to be an unusually large 
record." 1S The housing conditions are, indeed, according to 
Kelsey, 19 better in this county than in any rural district of the 
South. 



17. The effect of the houses is. of course, indirect since the real 
cause is in better economic and educational conditions. 

18. W. T. B. Williams. "Local Condition among Xegroes." 5-6. 
Pamphlet of Hampton Institute Press. 

19. Carl Kelsey. The Negro Farmer, 34. 



46 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

On the regular negro farms in this county there are also many 
evidences of progress. Here no women are found working in 
the fields but their time is spent around the houses and gardens. 
The crop lien system is unknown and each farmer raises his 
own vegetables, smokes his own meat, raises the grain for his 
own meal and flour, and buys for cash or short credit at the local 
store. That many negroes are gradually acquiring small places 
is borne out by the Census figures which show that in this 
county 96$ of the negro farmers are owners while the same 
percentage for the state as a whole is 66. Kelsey cites 20 the 
case of one negro farmer who, by thrift and industry, now owns 
part of the place on which he was a slave and his slave time 
cabin is now used as a shed. "He began by buying land in 
1873 paying from $10 to $11.50 per acre, and by hard work and 
economy, now owns sixty acres which are worth more than 
their first cost. With the help of his boys, whom he has man- 
aged to keep at home, he derives a comfortable income from his 
land. His daughter, now his housekeeper, teaches school during 
the winter. What he has done others can do. he says.*' An- 
other who has succeeded made his first payments from the sale 
of wood cut in clearing. In 1903 his acres were planted as fol- 
lows : orchard, 2; woodland, 8; pasture, 10; corn, 8; rye, 1; 
and garden. His children go to Hampton and he says that 
"one boy is already telling him how to get more produce from 
his land." 

In brief it may be said that here, as elsewhere, agriculture is 
somewhat neglected for the opportunities to earn money by 
quicker means, but that numerous single examples illustrate 
the possibilities. There is room for improvement in the meth- 
ods of tilling the soil, in the use of fertilizers, and in the rota- 
tion of crops, but this is true universally. The general social 
and moral improvement has been noted and, as Kelsey says, 
"It is a pleasure to find that one of the stronger factors in this 
improvement is due to the presence in the country of a number 
of graduates of Hampton." 

Hanover, a county on the border between the Tidewater 



20. Ibid, 34. 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 47 

Section and Middle Virginia, is typical of those less favored 
counties. Its total population is 17,200 of which 7,040 is ne- 
gro. Collectively the negroes make a very good showing along 
material lines : in Henry District there are 409 negro owners, 
242 of whom own less than 10 acres each, 109 from 10 to 25, 
58 over 25, and a few over a hundred. Out of a total of 289,332 
acres in the county exclusive of the town of Ashland negroes 
owned in 1914, according to the Auditor's Report, some 30,076 
acres as against 261,538 owned by the whites. Of the total 
farm property in the county assessed at $2,981,201 negroes own 
$317,714. Allowing for the under assessment this represents a 
true value of a little over S^OO.OOO.-' 1 But the individual hold- 
ings are in most cases too small to enable them to earn a living 
from this alone and they must rent additional land or work out. 
So far, in this county, most of their efforts at acquiring prop- 
erty have gone into land getting and little attention seems to 
have been given to the matter of housing. While improvements 
in Gloucester are assessed at about the same as the land, they 
are in Hanover assessed at only about half as much. 

Social conditions are not nearly so favorable here. Of the 
5,091 negroes over ten years of age in 1910, 1,687 or 33y were 
illiterate, while 459c of those of voting age could neither read 
nor write. According to the Superintendent's Report — the en- 
rollment in the schools is small for both races and only 43% 
for the negroes. "One of the teachers I visited rarely used a 
correct sentence. Yet he has been given a license annually for 
sixteen years." During the fall the boys are kept home to work 
on the tobacco farms and the ignorance and indifference on the 
part of the parents accounts for the irregular attendance of the 
younger children. 

The churches are numerous and have a large membership but 
they do not seem to contribute much to the general uplift of the 
people. One reason that has been assigned for this is the preva- 
lence of absentee preachers, who do not come into vital con- 



21. See Report of the Virginia Tax Commission, 1914. 

22. Report for 1902 quoted by "Williams, Local Conditions among 
Negroes," 6. 



48 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

tact with the people but leave the real work to the less able 
members of the profession. On the whole the county lacks the 
best efforts of both the church and school, and the result is a 
vast amount of ignorance which, in turn, reacts upon the morals 
of the people. Williams gives as the cause of much of the crime 
the sale of liquor in the county: "The common opinion of the 
white and colored people is that the crime is such as comes 
from ignorance, poor morals, and the use of liquors, rather 
than crime of a worse nature. Carrying concealed weapons, 
petty thieving, and impudence to white people are the occasions 
for most of the arrests according to the colored people and the 
county officials. * * * The nearness of Richmond and Pe- 
tersburg has perhaps something to do with Hanover's criminal 
record." 

The relations between the races in Hanover are, as is usually 
the case in Virginia, amicable but they are hardly as good as in 
Gloucester and in the counties at the foot of the Blue Ridge. 
The whites depend on the negroes for farm labor and there are 
but few white men employed as laborers at present, though they 
seem to be on the increase because of negro emigration and the 
presence of two railroads in the county which employs them as 
section hands at better wages than the farmers are able to offer. 
A number of the negroes employ all of their time as agricultural 
undertakers on their own small farms and, as this number in- 
creases, the available supply of farm laborers will naturally de- 
crease. 

When conditions in Hanover and Gloucester are contrasted the 
effect of the kind of industrial training given at Hampton is 
very apparent. "Hanover's greatest needs, it would seem, are 
more effective schools and churches, and especially better homes. 
There are too few good homes to exert a helpful influence upon 
the mass of the others. There is a marked absence among the 
residents of the county of graduates of the better schools and 
colleges and especially from those that lay stress in their train- 
ing upon home making. A few young women, well trained in 
domestic science and having the missionary spirit, could do a 
great deal of good here either as teachers or house-keepers." 

The central portion of Virginia which forms a triangle be- 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 49 

tvveen the North Carolina line, the Blue Ridge, and the fall line 
of the Atlantic rivers may, for the present purposes, be consid- 
ered under two heads : ( 1 ) those counties such as Prince Ed- 
ward where the negroes exist in large numbers and where the 
great staple is raised, and ( 2 ) those such as Albemarle where 
the negroes comprise about one-third of the rural population 
and either work as laborers or farm their own small food crops. 
This second type of rural economy need not receive our atten- 
tion here since it will be considered at length later, but before 
turning to Prince Edward which may be taken as representative 
of the first type let us examine the statistics for the section as a 
whole and see wherein it differs as a whole from the Tidewater 
and Valley Sections. 

For the thirty-five counties which compose this central part 
of Virginia the 1910 Census shows a total negro population 
(exclusive of cities) of 254,972 and a total white population of 
364,698; but in the tobacco counties on the South Side there 
are often more negroes than whites, and in the counties at the 
foot of the Blue Ridge the whites form from sixtv to eighty 
per cent, of the population. The percentage of negro owned 
farms to total negro farms is smaller in this section than in any 
other portion of the state, 17,859 farms out of a total of 27,444, 
or 65%, being operated by the owners. But if owners are fewer 
in this section, the negro farmers are more numerous since 
there is one negro farmer to every nine of the total negro rural 
population. A farm, however, especially in the cereal raising 
counties, often means merely a rural home where the owner 
derives his principal income from some other source. 'The 
total negro population decreased in this section 7.5% in the last 
census period whereas there was an increase for the whole state 
of 1.6% as against 16.5% for the whites. 

Taken collectively the negroes own considerable property in 
this section. In 1914 the Auditor's Report showed 1,024,264 
acres owned by negroes or 11.2% as much as that owned by 
the whites. 23 This land with its improvements was assessed at 



23. For the derivation of these and the succeeding figures see tables 
in the Appendix. 



50 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

$7,634,131 which represents an actual value of nearly $24,000,000. 
The estimated value of the same class of white property is a 
little over ten times as much or $245,022,325. The estimated 
value of negro land and improvements per acre is $23 and for 
the whites almost S27. 

The condition of the negroes in the South Side is probably 
poorer than in any other part of the state. Traveling through 
the counties of Prince Edward, Mecklenburg, Pittslyvania, etc. 
the homes of the negroes can be seen at every clearing and 
they range in character from the filthy log hut to very plain 
but substantial frame buildings. Although here agriculture is 
much more diversified than in the cotton states, still tobacco is 
the one big staple crop, and both the negro owners and renters 
still find it necessary to obtain advances from the country stores 
for food and fertilizer. Advances begin early in the spring and 
continue until near the close of the year when the tobacco is 
shipped to Farmville. Petersburg, Danville, and the other mar- 
kets. The merchant usually receives an interest charge of 6' ,' 
and a commission for selling the tobacco in addition to high in- 
itial prices. 

The average value of an acre of tobacco is almost impossible 
to estimate because of the varying market prices, qualities, and 
quantities. Speaking of Prince Edward County, Kelsey says : 
"It is probably safe to say that the negroes do not average over 
$20 per acre, ranging from $15 to $25, and have, perhaps, three 
or four acres in tobacco." 2i Since negroes as a rule live up 
to their income this would indicate advances ranging from $6.0 
to $100. In Prince Edward County, and the others of which 
it is typical, wheat and corn are rotated with tobacco and thus 
about half of the land is in tobacco at a time. Its productive- 
ness, however, is lower than in such counties as Albemarle and 
corn rarely runs over three barrels to the acre. Nevertheless 
this enables the negroes to supplement their incomes by fur- 
nishing the corn for their own meal. 

Renters either furnish three-fourths of the fertilizer and their 
own mules and implements and receive three-fourths of the 



24. Carl Kelsey, "The Negro Farmer." 36. 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 51 

crop, or one-half of the crop when the land-owner furnishes the 
mules and implements and one-half of the fertilizer. Tobacco 
is by nature a very exhausting crop and demands some four 
hundred pounds of fertilizer to the acre which, at one cent per 
pound, represents about four dollars to the acre. The average 
cash rental is about $3 to $3.50 per acre, which is, considering 
the cost of fertilizer, a little less than rent paid in kind. The 
average negro family in Prince Edward County, then, just about 
meets his advances with his tobacco, his wheat about supplies 
him with flour, his corn and fodder feed his stock, and an oc- 
casional odd job by himself or member of his family furnishes 
money for luxuries. 

Kelsey cites the budget of a family which is more or less typ- 
ical of the tenants on the South Side : "B — has a family of 
children and lives in a large cabin, one room with a loft. He 
owns a pair of oxen and manages to raise enough to feed them. 
He also raises about enough meat for his family. During the 
season of 1902 he raised $175 worth of tobacco; corn valued 
at S37.50 and sixteen bushels of wheat, a total of $221. De- 
ducting one-fourth for rent and estimating his expenses for fer- 
tilizer at $25, he had about $140 out of which to pay all other 
expenses." 25 Odd jobs, gardens, poultry, etc., however, sup- 
plement the income of the more industrious, and renting does, to 
a few of the tenants, offer a good living and the means to own- 
ership. 

But on the whole the acquisition of property by the 
negroes has been slower in this section than any where else in 
the state. Bruce says that the "negroes of the tobacco region 
of Virginia have, since emancipation, been afforded the most 
favorable opportunities of improving their condition by pur- 
chasing land. Its cheapness has put it in the power of every 
laborer to secure a small homestead. * * *_"26 That the 
masses, however, have not had the qualities necessary to pro- 
vide the purchase money seems evident by the fact that their 
acquisition of property has been slower here than elsewhere. It 



25. Ibid. 

26. P. A. Bruce, "The Plantation Xegro as a Free Man," 222. 



5Z PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

is probably to be accounted for by the fact that because of the 
reliance on the one crop system, agriculture, and hence the wealth 
of the section, has not been developed to its greatest possibilities. 
But in recent years the negroes have been making greater prog- 
ress and in Prince Edward County the negro owners in 1910 
constituted 72 c / c of all negro farmers. Many of these own a 
dozen or so acres and rent their actual farms but in Prince Ed- 
ward, which is, however, better off in this respect than other 
tobacco counties, many of the negroes own outright. In Buffalo 
District, for example, which is the largest in the county, there 
are 258 negro holdings ; 54 of these are less than ten acres ; 43 
are from thirty to forty-nine; and 70 are over 50 acres. Of the 
total of 220,082 acres in the county, negroes owned in 1914 
42.103 acres. That this land was not of a poorer quality is 
shown by the fact that about five times as much white land was 
assessed at about five times as much. 

In general it may be said that while the negroes of the South 
Side and of Prince Edward County still lag behind, they have 
recently begun to acquire land and in some districts have made 
material progress. In the matter of housing and education, how- 
ever, the backwardness is more evident. The log cabin is still 
the rule in this section while it is rare in Gloucester, and Wil- 
liams says that in all of the schools that he visited he only found 
two pupils into whose homes magazines or newspapers went reg- 
ularly. The Superintendent of Schools expresses the hope that 
school conditions in Prince Edward "compare very unfavorably 
with conditions in other Virginia counties, for it would be sad 
to think others were in a like fix." 

There were, in 1914, 3,104 negro children of school age and 
1,624 whites. 27 The percentage of enrollment for whites is 87 ' , 
and for negroes only 64% ," again, the percentage of attendance 
is 54% for the whites and only 34% for the negroes. The av- 
erage salary for negro teachers is only $25 and five years ago 
it was sometimes as low as $12. Twenty-five of the negro 



27. For this information I am indebted to Mr. P. T. Atkinson, 
Sup't of Schools for Prince Edward County. 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 53 

schools are aided by private subscription to continue for a longer 
session, but even with this help the average session is now only 
a little over five months. Of the forty-one negro schools in the 
county, five are held in log cabins. School conditions are, in- 
deed, worse in these counties than anywhere else in the state, 
but with the increased number of Hampton and Petersburg grad- 
uates as teachers they may normally be expected to improve. 

Realizing the need of good schools to keep the negroes in 
the country where they succeed best and to make them efficient 
rural workers, there has been a general movement recently 
throughout the state to improve the rural school facilities. The 
General Education Board has provided for a State Supervisor 
of Negro Rural Schools for Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, 
Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee, and the Jeannes and Slater 
Funds, by various arrangements with local authorities, aid in- 
dustrial education in the rural districts. The training in indus- 
trial and domestic sciences in the rural schools is gradually 
spreading throughout the state and that it is practical in its 
nature is shown by the following report of Jackson Davis, Su- 
pervisor for Virginia : 

"During the year 1912-13, twenty-three supervising industrial 
teachers were employed for the negro rural schools of twenty- 
five counties. There were in these counties 591 negro schools; 
417 of these were visited regularly by the industrial teachers, 
who introduced and taught cooking, sewing, shuck mat making, 
and various forms of practical industrial work. They made a 
total of 2,853 visits during the school term, 189 of the schools 
having a short term, extended the term by private subscription 
one month, so that an average term of six months was main- 
tained in these twenty-five counties. Twenty new school houses 
were built, costing S23.S08 and fifteen were enlarged at a cost 
of $2,212.09. 

"Forty-six buildings were painted and eighty-one white- 
washed ; 370 schools used individual drinking cups and in 102 
sanitary outhouses were built. The 428 school improvement 
leagues raised in cash for new buildings, extended terms, equip- 
ment and other improvements, $22,655.80. I think it is safe to 



54 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

say that labor and materials of various sorts were contributed 
by the various leagues to the value of $10,000, though the teach- 
ers had no uniform standard by which to estimate this. 

"Summer Garden and Canning work for the girls was carried 
on by thirteen of these teachers in fourteen counties during the 
summer months; 617 girls were reported enrolled in the clubs 
and 416 gardens were reported good and 122 poor. The girls 
put up 10,504 jars of vegetables and fruits and their mothers 
put up 12,269, making a total of 22,773 jars. Almost none of 
this is sold but is used in the homes for the table in the winter. 

"In addition to this work, the teachers gave the girls in their 
meetings in the different homes during the summer months, 193 
cooking lessons, and 178 sewing lessons; 136 of these homes 
were whitewashed." 

In view of the varying conditions in the different localities 
it is apparent that whatever education of this character is given 
should be adapted to the needs of the particular community. 
And this is, indeed, the basis for the so-called Halifax Plan 28 
which is now in operation under the direction of the state su- 
pervisor and which consists in placing in each county a super- 
visor who is acquainted with the social, agricultural, and phys- 
ical conditions, and who is, therefore capable of determining 
what actually is utilitarian education. Such a plan makes it 
possible to give the kind of agricultural and industrial training 
that is adapted to the needs of the particular locality and thus 
work toward making the negro an efficient citizen at home. To 
make them this obviates the white antagonism to spending one- 
third of the school fund on the education of the negroes, who 
only pay one-thirtieth of the taxes, by giving value received. 
The supervisor in Halifax is financed jointly by Hampton, the 
General Education Board, the County Board, and by private 
subscriptions and the whole work is under the direction of the 
State Supervisor. This plan has been put into operation in 
several of the counties and where it is done the United States 
Department of Agriculture has agreed to and is placing negro 



23. See "The Halifax Plan for the Practical Education of the Ne- 
gro," J. W. Church. Hampton Institute Press 1910. 



RVRAL LAND OWNERSHIP 55 

farm demonstrators. All of these movements are based on the 
assumption that to improve the economic condition of the state, 
the efficiency of the producers, no matter what their color, must 
be raised. And as far as can be judged by results in those coun- 
ties where the negroes have been in closer contact with practical 
education, it may be taken as a maxim that greater efficiency 
is best obtained by industrial education. This has been true 
throughout the ages ; the European barbarians were benefited 
bv contact with Rome not because of its literature or militarism, 
but because of its experience in agriculture and the agricultural 
arts which, when adopted by the people, laid the foundation for 
the later German civilization. 

In this very inadequate discussion we have reviewed the note- 
worthy rapidity with which the negro is acquiring property in 
Virginia, 29 and the conditions among the negro rural population 
in the several most typical sections of the state. One point 
stands out above all the rest : the economic environment varies 
greatly even within the bounds of a single state and whatever 
course the negro pursues in working out his problem must be 
related to this. More or less overlooked in the discussion, but 
none the less important, is the necessity for sympathetic white 
counsel and direction. In Virginia this element of help seems 
to be forthcoming and the negro leaders of the Tidewater Sec- 
tion especially bear witness to the fact that the members of their 
race have been "greatly encouraged in their efforts to accu- 
mulate property and become substantial citizens by the best ele- 
ment of the native white people." "° It will become more and 
more apparent, as we consider actual conditions, that the own- 
ership of land by the negroes does foster and develop those 
qualities which work for a substantial citizenship and a greater 
social production of wealth. 



29. "It is safe to say that when it comes to the matter of prop- 
erty holding, the negro in the North is a century behind his brother 
in the South." J. T. Hewin. "Hampton Negro Conference Report," 
1904, 35. 

30. T. C. Walker, "Negro Property Holding in Tidewater Virginia." 
Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sc, Sept., 1'.':::. 



CHAPTER IV. 
Negro Land Ownership in Albemarle County. 

In the previous discussion the divergence in rural conditions 
in the different localities has been noted. And it has been noted 
further that Central Virginia, as a section, may be divided into 
two smaller groups : the one typified by such counties as Prince 
Edward where one staple crop continues to be raised largely 
by negroes, and the other typified in those counties where the 
cereals and fruits are raised on land usually owned by the oper- 
ator and where the crops are greatly diversified. 

Albemarle belongs to the latter class, and yet, if any one county 
can be taken as representative of the whole group, a better one 
could not be chosen. Indeed, the county is half in Middle Vir- 
ginia and half in the Piedmont Section and a line drawn from 
North to South running through Charlottesville, the county seat, 
may be said to be the division. The elevation ranges from 400 
feet in the eastern and southern part of the county to 3,000 feet 
at Jarman's Gap at the summit of the Blue Ridge. 

In a number of ways Albemarle County is typical of the state 
as a whole. Its population in 1910, exclusive of the city of 
Charlottesville, was 29,871, of which 20,198 were white and 
9,673 colored, a ratio about the same as that for the state. The 
land area of the county is about 750 square miles and its popula- 
tion density is 39.8 per square mile which is nearly the same as 
that for the state as a whole. In its history, also, Albemarle is 
representative of both the old and new counties of the Old Do- 
minion. 

Albemarle County was populated by two streams of people; 
one coming from the older counties of the Tidewater Section and 
bringing with them their slaves and their plantation system, and 
the other coming east from the Valley where they had been ac- 
customed to small farms. The first patents were taken out in 
1727 and were for holdings of from three to thirteen thousand 

56 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 57 

acres, 1 which early assured the establishment of the plantation 
system in the eastern part of the county. The act creating the 
county was passed by the legislature in 1744, and the organiza- 
tion took place near the present town of Scottsville in 1745.- In 
1869 the present county of Albemarle was divided into the five 
townships, subsequently termed magisterial districts, of Rivanna, 
White Hall, Samuel Miller, Scottsville, and Charlottesville. In 
1875 Ivy District was added and the county retains these same 
districts today. 

In the published letters of Major Thomas Anbury, a British 
Officer and prisoner in Albermarle during the Revolutionary War, 
there are some interesting observations on early life in Albemarle 
which may help us to understand better the present conditions. 
"The plantations are scattered here and there," he says, "over 
the land which is thickly covered with timber. On these there 
is a dwelling house, with kitchen, smokehouse, and other out- 
houses detached, and from the various buildings each plantation 
has the appearance of a small village. At some distance from 
the houses are peach and apple orchards, and scattered over the 
plantations are the negro's huts, and tobacco barns, which are 
large and built of wood for the cure of that article. * 
Most of the planters consign the care of their plantations and 
negroes to an overseer ; even the man whose house we rent 
has an overseer, though he could with ease superintend it him- 
self. * * * There were, and still are, three degrees of rank 
among the inhabitants, exclusive of the negroes ; but I am afraid 
the advantage of this distinction will never exist again in this 
country in the same manner it did before the commencement 
of hostilities." s At the risk of being irrelevant these passages 
have been quoted to show that in its early history the eastern 
part of Albemarle resembled the older counties of Virginia while 
the western part resembled, in its agricultural economy, the Val- 
ley of Virginia. The effects of the early settlement can be traced 
in the different parts of the county today. 



1. Edgar Woods, "History of Albemarle," 2. 

2. Ibid, S. 

3. Quoted by Woods, Ibid, 39-42. 



58 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

In the western part of the county, where the negroes are less 
numerous and the white farms generally smaller, lies the great 
fruit belt which is the original home of the celebrated Albemarle 
pippin. On the lower lands below eight or nine hundred feet 
elevation in the central and eastern part of the county the sandy 
Cecil clay soil is fertile and capable of producing fine fruit and 
cereal crops. Lands in these various parts of the county have 
a wide range in value; the old field lands often selling for as low 
as $4 per acre while that land which is used for orchards and 
country homes brings often as much as $500. Average farming 
land, including buildings thereon, is assessed at about $12 per 
acre which, according to 'the findings of the Virginia Tax Com- 
mission, represents an actual value of about $40. The value of 
land and improvements per acre owned by the negroes runs con- 
siderably less than that owned by the white. This condition, 
however, is not due solely to the fact that the negro land is in- 
ferior because the orchardists are all white and there are many 
valuable country estates in the county. 

There are, in general, two types of farms in the county: those 
in the western part of the county which raise fruit almost ex- 
clusively, and those devoted to general agriculture east of the 
line running through Charlottesville. Crozet, a village just at 
the foot of the Blue Ridge, is the largest fruit shipping point in 
the state and in good years some 35,000 to 40,000 barrels of 
apples are shipped from here. This district merges into Green- 
wood, also a fruit center and shipping point five miles off, Bates- 
ville, seven miles off at the foot of the Ragged mountains, and 
White Hall, also at the foot of the Blue Ridge. In general ag- 
riculture the county is well adapted to the production of all of 
the cereals with the possible exception of barley. Corn, of 
course, is the principal cereal and average farming land properly 
managed may be expected to yield from 6 to 10 barrels to the 
acre. Wheat, under similar conditions, may be expected to pro- 
duce from 3 to 6 barrels and winter oats produces about 30 
bushels to the acre. 4 Tobacco was, before the war, one of the 



4. These figures were obtained from farmers. 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 59 

princioal crops but with the changed conditions its production 
has been reduced to practically nil. 

The Census gives the value of all of the crops for Albemarle 
County at $1,486,629 divided as follows: cereals $697,816; other 
grains $1,416: hay and forage $258,808: vegetables $183,109; 
fruits $163,316; and all other crops SlS2.16 r >. These estimates 
are of course inaccurate, but they at least show the extent of di- 
versification in the county. 

In brief, then, by its history, location, density and inter-racial 
ratio of population, and by the diversity of its agriculture Albe- 
marle is typical of the older counties at the foot of the Blue 
Ridge, and what is said of the negroes in its rural district is alike 
applicable to many other counties of the state. 

The statistics for the white and negro population in the county 
reflect the agricultural conditions before the War and show the 
present conditions : 

TABLE X: POPULATION BY DECADES. 



Year 

1850 


White 
11.875 


Slave 
13,916 


Free Negro 

587 

60G 
14,994 
16,659 
14,126 
10,337 

'J. I'm 1 


% Negro 
53.9% 




12,103 


54.5% 




12,550 


54.4 




15.959 


51. 




18,252* 


43.6 


1900 


18,135 


36.3 




20,1 '.is 


32.4 











Prior to the War there were two agricultural systems in the 
county : the one, which was general in the foothills, was a small 
farm system where the farmers with a few slaves, and sometimes 
indeed with none at all, raised small food crops ; the other was 
the tobacco plantation with large slave holdings. The two sys- 
tems did, indeed, reflect the agricultural economy of the two 
types of people who settled in Albemarle ; in the west there were 
those who had come from the Valley where the small farm was 



*Charlottesville not included after 1890. Population of Charlottes- 
ville 1910, 4,241 whites and 2,524 negroes. 



60 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

general and in the east there were the planters who had come 
from eastern Virginia. That the plantation greatly predom- 
inated, however, is shown by the high percentage of negroes up 
until the time when the large single staple crop was abandoned. 

It will be interesting to compare the white and negro popula- 
tion of Albemarle with that of its neighbors, Augusta, in the 
Valley, and Louisa, in Middle Virginia. 

TABLE XI: POPULATION MOVEMENTS IN THREE ADJA- 
CENT COUNTIES. 



Albemarle Augusta Louisa 

Year white negro 

1850 11.S75 13,925 

I860 12,103 14,523 

1870 12,550 14,994 

1880 

1890 1S.252 14,126 

1900 18,135 10,337 

1910 20.198 9.673 



white 


negro 


white 


negro 


18,983 


5,637 


6,423 


10,268 


21.547 


6,202 


6,183 


10,518 


22,026 


6,737 


6,269 


10,063 


28,596 


8,407 


7,192 


9,805 


26,670* 


5,700 


7,896 


8,621 


27,904 


4,541 


8,695 


7,883 



The slaves were greatly in the minority in Augusta because 
here the small farm system was in operation, while in Louisa, a 
plantation county, the reverse condition was true. Albemarle, 
as would be expected by its location between the two and the 
conditions of its settlement, was in an intermediate position and 
has since remained so as far as the negro population is con- 
cerned. 

Within the boundary of the county the same tendency is shown 
in the distribution of the negro population. In the eastern dis- 
trict where the slaves were numerous the negroes are numerous 
today, and in the mountain districts where they were always few 
they are few now. The black districts, furthermore, seem to be 
growing blacker while the white districts are growing whiter : 5 



♦Includes Staunton to 1900. 

5. This tendency seems to be universally true. See R. P. Brooks, 
"A Local Study of the Race Problem," Pol. Sc. Quar. 1911 and Du- 
Bois, "The Souls of the Black Folk." 



te pop. 


negro pop. 


io neg 


3,505 


2,321 


39.87c 


4,271 


1,966 


31.5 


3,269 


897 


21.5 


9S0 


535 


35.3 


3,918 


3,481 


38.8 


4,255 


L.473 


25.7 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 61 

TABLE XII: POPULATION BY DISTRICTS.*' 



Districts Taxpayers 

Rivanna 572 

Charlottesville 181 

White Hall 10 

Ivy 39 

Scottsville 541 

Samuel Miller 211 

Totals 1,554 20.198 9,673 32.4 

In three of the magisterial districts the negro population is 
greater than that for the county as a whole. In the case of 
Rivanna and Scottsville this condition is to be explained by the 
fact that here there are the greatest number of negro land-own- 
ers, and in the Ivy District it is to be explained by the greater 
demand in this section for servants and farm hands. In White 
Hall, Samuel Miller, and Ivy the white holdings are smaller and 
there are few negro holdings; a condition which would naturally 
lead us to expect a smaller negro population. In the Charlottes- 
ville District the negroes are about the same as in Charlottes- 
ville. 

Of the 480,000 acres forming the approximate area of Albe- 
marle County, 386,491 are in farms and 226,830 are improved. 
The average acreage per farm is 141 acres, something more than 
for the state as a whole, and the average improved acreage is 
82.8. 

The last census shows a 100% increase in the value of farm 
property and gives the value in 1910 of all farm property at 
$14,945,561. This increase, however, which the census shows to 
be more or less universal, is to be partly explained by the fact 
that the last census was taken during a period of reaction from 
the 1907 panic when land values were on a "boom" while the 
previous one was taken during a period of depression. The real 
increase was hardly half of this. 



6. These figures for population were compiled especially by the 
Census Bureau and are not in any printed report. 



62 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

The Census does not report property ownership for the county 
by races, but from the books of the County Treasurer the assess- 
ment can be derived, and these, corrected according to the ratio 
between assessed value and the value of property based on recent 
sales, will give a reasonably accurate idea of the value of land 
and buildings owned in the county by the respective races. 

TABLES XIII: FARM VALUES BY RACES. 

White Negro % Negro 

Number of acres 426,455 25.S62 5.7% 

Assessed value of land $2,700,080.00 $146,858.00 5.1 

Assessed value of buildings... 2,447.252.00 153,235.00 5.8 

Total 5,147,332.00 300.093.00 5.5 

Ratio of Ass. V. to Sales V. 30% 30% 

Est. true value $17,157,773.00 $1,000,310.00 5.5 

Value land per acre 21.10 18.92 89.6 

V. land and bldgs. per acre... 42.33 38.67 91.3 

The negro ownership is confined almost exclusively to the Ri- 
vanna and Scottsville Districts where they own about 80^e> of 
their acreage. In the other four districts together they own but 
4,438 acres while in the Scottsville District alone they own over 
10.000 acres and in the Rivanna over ",000. The white improved 
land is worth considerably more per acre than is indicated by the 
figures because the negro land, which is all in small holdings, 
is apt to be improved and in crops while much of the larger white 
holdings is in pasture or woodland. The average size of holdings 
for the negroes run considerably higher in the Scottsville than 
in the Rivanna District, but it is worth only $12 an acre as against 
about $22 in the Rivanna District. There is a still greater dif- 
ference in the value of improvements. 

The thirteenth census gives the total number of farms in the 
county at 2,741, of which 637 belong to negroes and 2,104 to 
whites. Thus where the negroes compose 32.4 per cent, of the 
population, they are 30.2^ of the farmers. There are few ten- 
ants in the county of any race and fewer negro tenants. Indeed 
there are in Albemarle only 408 tenants and of these 364 are 
white men operating under their own supervision and not as a 
part of a plantation. The Tax Receiver's books show some 1,554 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 63 

negro land owners, but often two or three acres are held by 
different members of the same family and it is safe to estimate 
that in 1914 the separate negro places were not over 900 and 
probably not this many. At any rate it shows a considerable 
increase over the 1910 census figures and personal observation 
bears out the assumption that there have been a number of places 
acquired in the past few years. 

Estimating that there are 850 separate negro places in the 
county, the average size of a farm owned by one family is about 
30 acres while the average individual holding is 16.6 acres. The 
average size of a negro owned farm for the state is about 40 
acres with about half of this improved. There are at present 
in the county 30 negroes who own over 100 acres, ten of whom 
own over 200 acres and three of whom own over 300 acres. 
There are 63 who own between 50 and 100 acres. But the vast 
majority of them are small and, as will appear later, serve only 
as homes for the negroes who have some other means of sup- 
port. In the Rivanna District alone, where there are some 572 
holdings, 379 of them are under ten acres and many of these con- 
sist of only one or two acres. When compared with the holdings 
of the whites the subdivisions are, indeed, very small, but it is 
no evidence of widespread intensive cultivation. 

But while the holdings are small, they are most of them owned 
outright, and the negroes have little debt. Of the negroes inter- 
viewed practically all, or 96% of them, had finished paying for 
their land and were free from debt. One of the best farmers 
questioned had begun acquiring land immediately after the war 
and now owns two good farms totalling 205 acres free from 
debt. Others had owned their property for twenty or thirty 
years and the average period of negro ownership was found to 
be about twenty years. Allowing for the recent purchases in this 
average, this further bears out our conclusion reached earlier in 
this paper 7 that negroes did not begin to acquire property in 
large numbers much before 1880. 

The tendency since the War in Albemarle, as elsewhere, has 
been for the size of farms to steadily decrease. After the War 



7. See above, 30 & 31. 



64 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

the plantation system was impossible to maintain because of the 
difficulty of controlling the negroes, and after a few years of un- 
successful attempts was given up. In 1850 the average size of a 
farm in Albemarle County was probably about 300 acres, 8 or 
some sixty acres larger than the average farm for the state as a 
whole; in 1880 this average had shrunk to 202 acres and in 1910 
to 141 acres. Thus the breaking up of the plantations tended to- 
ward the creation of small farms for both whites and blacks and 
enabled the poor whites as well as the negroes to become owners 
and operate their own farms. That tenantry, especially for the 
negroes, is a thing of the past and that the farmers are becoming 
more and more owners is shown by the following : 

TABLE XIV: FARM TENURE 1900-1910. 



100O 

Owners and 

Farms part owners Tenants Managers 

White 1,969 1,355 493 121 

Negro 6(37 563 97 7 

1910 

White 2,104 1,615 364 125 

Negro 637 581 44 12 

The negro owners increased 28 and the tenants decreased 53 
making their total practically negligible. The negro rural popu- 
lation of the county may, therefore, be considered not as a ten- 
ant class, but as a laboring and owning class exclusively. So far 
as can be learned from observation the two go together and the 
owners usually come into this class from laboring rather than 
from cropping. Only a small percentage of the owners inter- 
viewed had ever been croppers, but most of them had been, or 
still are, farm or railway laborers or semi-skilled artisans. 

The 1900 Census gives the number of white and negro far- 
meis classified by principal source of income for the state as a 
whole, but not for the counties. At the time of this classification 



8. This is an estimate made on the basis of area in farms and agri- 
cultural population. 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 65 

26. 7%. of the farms in the state were operated by negroes. Of 
the hay and grain farms 21.8% were operated by negroes; of 
vegetable farms, 37.9 ( ,, ; of fruit farms, 15.5' , ; of stock farms, 
15.2% ; of cotton, 57.1 ; of tobacco, 37.3 r ',_ ; and of farms raising 
miscellaneous crops 33.6% were operated by negroes. As far 
as observation can be relied upon, the conditions in Albemarle 
are scarcely what is indicated by these figures ; there are no ne- 
gro orchardists and very few negro stock raisers. There are, 
of course, no cotton farms in the county, but vegetable and mis- 
cellaneous crops are raised by the negroes more than other speci- 
fied crops. In fact the negro farms of the county might almost 
all be put in the miscellaneous class raising a little com and 
wheat, vegetables, a few fruit trees, and possibly a few head of 
stock. 

During the last census period the total negro population in trie 
county decreased from 10,337 to 9,673 or 6.9%, but the number 
of negro farmers decreased only from 667 to 637 or 4.5%. 
Among the whites just the reverse tendering was true; while 
there was an increase in population of 11.3% there was an in- 
crease of only 6.8%, in the number of white farmers. If the ab- 
solute number of negro farmers were low these figures would 
not be significant, but since the ratio of negro farmers to total 
negro population is as great as the same ratio for the whites, 
they show that, while the county is getting whiter, the negroes 
are staying on the farms relatively better than the whites. The 
negro fanners increased 1.53 times as fast as did the negro pop- 
ulation, while the white farmers only .60 times as fast as their 
population. The decrease in ratio of total negro population is, 
therefore, due to the moving away of the non-land-owning class 
rather than the farmers. There was an absolute increase in ne- 
gro farm owners and the decrease noted above is accounted for 
by the decrease in tenants. 

The negroes in Charlottesville have always been relatively a 
little more numerous than those in the county, but during the 
last census period the decrease in the city was as great as that in 
the county. Thus on the negative side too, the figures show that 
the negroes of Albemarle are not going to town but are staying 
in the country. This condition is not true all over the South and 

—5 



66 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

there has been much alarm occasioned by the tendency of the ne- 
gro to move to the city, but it is true in Albemarle County and it 
is true for the state as a whole. y 

It has been pointed out that what is said of Albemarle is true 
in large measure of other counties at the foot of the Blue Ridge 
and the population movements for the two races, the land values, 
the relative size of white and negro farms, the absence of ten- 
ancy among the negroes, and the crops grown by the negroes 
have been discussed. It has been pointed out, further, that the 
figures tend to show that in Albemarle County, at least, the ne- 
groes are staying in the country. From this we can proceed to a 
study of the actual conditions among the individual negro inhab- 
itants of the rural districts of the county. 



9. The figures are given in Chap. II above. 



CHAPTER V. 

Economic Conditions Among the Negroes in Albemarle 

County. 

The occupations found among the rural negroes in Albemarle 
County are those characteristic of a county where most of the 
agriculture is undertaken by the whites, where there is consider- 
able wealth, where the agriculture is diversified, and where the 
population is fairly dense. We have noticed the diversity of the 
agriculture : cereals, peaches, apples, grapes, hay, cattle, dairying, 
etc., and the mere mentioning of these products suggests several 
occupations which are to be added to the usual routine of work 
in a section devoted solely to the cultivation of corn and wheat. 
Furthermore, there is always a demand for domestic service and 
the two railroads which run through the county employ a num- 
ber of negroes as section hands. 

Since the War there have been two tendencies affecting the oc- 
cupations of the negroes: (1) increased diversification as a re- 
sult of the more complex economic society, and (2) the compe- 
tition of the whites has tended to limit the pursuits of the negroes 
to those callings not requiring particular skill. In Albemarle 
County before the war, the bulk of the negroes were slaves and 
were either agricultural laborers or domestics. There were, how- 
ever, as elsewhere in Virginia, a considerable number of free 
negroes, many of whom owned small farms or were trained ar- 
tisans. Among the slaves, also, there were negroes trained in 
such trades as shoemaking, caq^entry, plastering, blacksmithing 
?nd the like. The presence of these negroes, trained in skilled 
labor, prevented the growth of the white artisan class, and the 
negroes, immediately after the War, came almost to monopolize 
these trades. This fact, together with the negroes natural tend- 
ency to "move on," accounted for the movement to the cities 
after the war where all who were trained during slavery became 
barbers, masons, carpenters, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, negro 
shopkeepers, etc. 

In the past twenty-five years, however, the industrial changes 

67 



68 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

which have taken place in the South have done much to minimize 
the feeling on the part of the whites that these trades were 
meant solely for the negroes, and negroes have had to face their 
competition in all of these pursuits. In all of the building trades 
the negroes, who once had a monopoly on them, are being forced 
into the background and in the towns the Greeks have taken the 
shoeshining and restaurant business from them. According to 
the testimony of old residents, twenty years ago negro black- 
smiths and carpenters were more numerous in the country than 
were the whites. Today, while a considerable number of negro 
carpenters and blacksmiths remain scattered through the country, 
the bulk of this business is done by whites. 1 The negroes have 
either gone to farm laboring or have moved to towns, where they 
can, as merchants or artisans, cater to negro trade; their utter 
failure to compete with the whites has usually driven them out 
of those occupations where they must serve white customers. 

In the Rivanna District of Albemarle County 103 homes were 
visited by the writer and the occupations asked. These homes 
were taken from about three times that many scattered all over 
the District, and the attempt was made to visit some of all kinds 
in each group, so the results, while not complete, are typical. 
The total number of people for which a record was obtained 
was 486, those above ten years of age are divided among occu- 



1. This, however, is due solely to the competition of the more 
efficient white workers, and not to any prejudice existing against 
working in the same trade as is the case in the North. Stone, in 
his "Studies in the American Race Problem," says that this is the 
place "where the negro profits by the drawing of the Southern color 
line. The white masons and carpenters work side by side with the 
negro because they know that this line exists for them just exactly 
as it does for the lawyer or the doctor. The negro recognizes that 
the white man is not lowered one particle in the estimation of the 
community, because of his occupation. Each knows that the status 
of the other remains unchanged." 166. 

Speaking on the same subject, Booker T. Washington says, "It is 
in 'the South that the black man finds an open sesame in labor, in- 
dustry, and business that is not surpassed anywhere. It is here that 
that form of slavery which prevents a man from selling his labor to 
whom he pleases on account of his color, is almost unknown." 
Quoted in E. G. Murphy. "Problems of the Present South." 1S4. 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 69 

pations as follows: regular farm hands 41; railroad and road 
hands 20; carpenters, masons and cement workers 9; blacksmiths 
3 ; shoemaker 1 ; chauffeurs and coachmen 4 ; store keepers 3 ; 
"blind tiger" keeper 1; farmers (devoting all of their time to 
owned or rented land ) 24 ; housewives ( devoting all time to their 
own places ) 67 ; washerwomen and housemaids ( also house- 
wives) 36; teachers 3; preachers 2; living at home unoccupied 
and dependent 105, 94 of whom are children above the age of 
ten, but still attending school. This is a total of 341, the 145 
children make up the balance. Following the classification used 
in the Farmville report - for those over 10, we have : those work- 
ing on their own account, 50; laborers 82; house service 103; 
day domestic service 36; at home unoccupied and dependent, 106. 

TABLE: XV: PER CENT. OF NEGROES VISITED IN ALBE- 
MARLE COUNTY, OF SANDY SPRINGS- NEGROES, 
AND OF TOTAL POPULATION OF U. S. EN- 
GAGED IN EACH CLASS OF GAIN- 
FUL OCCUPATION. 



Sandy Sp' 


gs U.S. 


per cent 


per cent 


45.48 


39.65 


2.76 


4.15 



Class of Albemarle 

Occupation Males Females Total Per cent. 

Agriculture 86 4 90 52.3 

Professional .... 2 3 5 2.91 
Domestic and 

personal 4 36 40 23.25 43.97 19.18 

Trades and 

trans 23 1 24 13.95 

Mfgs. and trades. 13 13 7.57 

Total 128 44 172 100.00 



1.51 


14.63 


6.28 


22.39 


00.00 


100.00 



The percentage for trade and transportation, it will be noticed, 
is unusually high and is accounted for by the demand for ne- 
groes as workmen on the railroads in the county. Because of 
the double tracking now being done in the county by the South- 
ern Railway this is perhaps a little above normal although all 



2. W. E. DuBois, "Negroes of Farmville, Virginia," Bulletin of 
Dept. of Labor No. 14. 

3. W. T. Thorn, "The Negroes of Sandy Springs, Md.." Bulletin 
Department of Labor, No. 32. 



70 



PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 



but two of the twenty railway hands gave this as their regular 
occupation. 

The following table gives the occupations and incomes of 
twenty families interviewed. It must be remembered that the 
real income is somewhat higher than would be indicated by the 
figures because practically all of the negroes supplement their 
incomes with gardens and poultry. 

TABLE XVI: OCCUPATIONS AND INCOMES OF 22 TYPICAL 
HEADS OF FAMILIES IN THE RIVANNA DISTRICT. 



















Occupation 

ho 


V 

in 


N C 

iJ5 £ 


■a 

V 

•* s. 


in u 

v £ 
M 


"3 % 

3 C 
C O 
C u 

< .5 


o "o 
■ u 

►5 B 


o 


R. R. hand... 


. 40 


m 


5 


32 


$9.00 


?2S8 




$288 


R. R. hand... 


. 38 


m 


7 


52 


9.00 


468 




468 


R. R. hand... 


. 30 


m 


3 


30 


9.00 


270 


50 


320 


Farmer 


. 48 


m 


12 






350 




350 


Farmer 


. 69 


m 


5 






250 


100 


350 


Farmer 


. 30 


m 


2 






100 


150* 


250 


Farmer 


77 


m 


3 






300 




300 


Farm hand. . . 


. 42 


m 


6 


52 


4.50 


234 




234 


Farm hand. . . 


. 55 


m 


5 


30 


4.50 


135 


100f 


235 


Farm hand. . . 


. 42 


m 


o 


52 




ISO 




180 


Dairyman . . . 


. 50 


m 


9 


52 


6.00 


312 


25 


337 


Stableman ... 


. 4i> 


m 


7 


52 




600 




600 


Chauffeur .... 


37 


m 


10 


52 




360 


50 


410 


Carpenter . . . 


37 


m 


2 


30 


15.00 


450 




450 


Carpenter . . . 


. 35 


m 


9 


35 


9.00 


315 


50 


365 


Shoemaker . . 


. 50 


m 


4 






300 




300 


Storekeeper . 


. 44 


m 


4 






400 


100J 


500 


Preacher .... 


. 68 


m 


3 






120 


100§ 


220 


Blacksmith .. 


. 70 


m 


2 






250 


50 


300 


Day laborer . 


. 40 


m 


7 


30 


6.00 


180 


50 


230 


Washwoman 


. 3S 


f 


3 


52 




144 




144 


Washwoman 


. 52 


f 


2 


52 




72 




72 


*Wife cooks 


















fSon's wages and sa 


e of 


crop. 












{Sale price of crop. 
















§Sale price 


>f crop. 

















RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 71 

A brief discussion of eaoh class of occupation found among 
the negroes in Albemarle County will be instructive : 

Broadly speaking the negro undertaker in business enterprise 
is a new thing. But the negro foreman on the plantation was a 
comparatively familiar figure and many of the slaves who were 
trained as cobblers, blacksmiths, carpenters, cooks, etc., went 
into business on their own account after the War. But the ef- 
fect of white competition and the fact that so many of the 
younger generation have not had the necessary training has 
tended to crowd the negroes out of these trades. Those who are 
left are, almost without exception, either the very old negroes 
or those who have attended one of the industrial schools in the 
state. 

Of the three blacksmiths visited, two own their own shops and 
the other rents from the widow of its former owner. Two are 
well along in years, one having been a slave ; and the third, hav- 
ing but little work to do in his shop farms twenty acres of corn 
on shares. One owner has only his shop, but he earns on an 
average of $5 per week from his trade; the other, who owns 
four acres of land besides his shop, has a business of about $300 
and the proceeds of his garden. The third blacksmith visited 
gave his income at about $350, $200 of which is derived from 
the sale of his wheat and corn. There are several white black- 
smith shops in the same district which, with better equipment, 
appear to be doing a better business, but the negroes make a 
fairly good living. 

The shoemaker interviewed owns his home near the commun- 
ity of Stony Point, but not his shop. He is a free born native 
of Washington, D. C, but has been living in this county for 
twenty-two years and his grown sons remained in the coun- 
try. He gave his income at $25 per month and his home is worth 
about $200. 

Three store keepers and one "blind tiger" keeper were inter- 
viewed. One store keeper, near Keswick, owns his own home 
and store and fifteen acres of land, his whole property being 
worth $1,200. His mercantile business, he says, nets him some 
$400 per year and his crop he sells for from S50 to $100. The 
second merchant, in the same district, owns his store and twelve 



72 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

acres of land which are worth about $600 and carry a mortgage 
of $175 which was borrowed to finish payment on his place. 
His store nets him about $400 per year and his wife earns some- 
thing from washing. The third store keeper questioned owns a 
store and home valued at about $800 and he nets about $250 from 
his business. His whole place is tidy and in good repair and he 
carries a savings account in one of the Charlottesville banks. 
The fourth "merchant," a woman living with her mother, has a 
place worth about $1,000 and fifteen acres in timber. The pro- 
ceeds from her illicit sale of liquor net her about $150 per year 
and her mother earns about half that amount doing day service 
in neighboring white homes. While there are many white stores 
scattered throughout the county, the negroes cater to the trade 
of their own race and are not seriously handicapped by the white 
competition. The store keepers questioned were all, however, 
exceptionally good negroes which probably accounts for their 
success more than their vocation. Be that as it may, few negroes 
were found in better economic condition. 

Of most importance among the undertakers of the county are, 
of course, the farmers. Of 103 negro rural land owners taken 
all over the Rivanna District, 24 or not quite one fourth devote 
all of their time to the care of their crops, and in several of these 
families the income is supplemented by the wages of grown sons 
who work on white farms or by domestic service done by the 
women of the family. There is a great diversity in the condition 
of the farmers ; there are some, usually old negroes, who own 
farms of 100 acres or more of excellent land in good cultivation, 
and there are others who, on twenty or thirty acres of inferior 
land bought at a low rate, try to eke out an existence. Besides 
these there are the fifty or sixty owners of small farms who work 
at regular or odd jobs and leave the care of their crops to their 
families, but these are not considered here as agricultural entre- 
preneurs. The best farm operator in the district who was ques- 
tioned is an old man born before the war. He owns a farm near 
Earlysville of 70 acres which, with improvements, is worth some 
$2,500. Two miles below he owns another place of 136 acres 
which he uses for grazing hogs, cattle, and horses. His stock, 
exclusive of young pigs and poultry, is worth about $2,000 and 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 



73 



includes 14 horses, 20 cattle, and 10 hogs. Sixty acres of his 
upper place he has planted in wheat, com, oats, and hay and he 
raises on an average of five barrels of corn to an acre. His flour 
and meal is all ground from his own grains and his poultry and 
meat are all raised on the place. He feeds up practically all of 
his crop and last year sold his cattle and hogs for $250. In bet- 
ter years he says that he has done much better than this ; he said, 
"I ain't making much now. but I has made it as you can see by 
looking around." And, indeed, it was very apparent : the house, 
a two story frame building of eight rooms, is well painted, all 
of the fences and outhouses are in perfect repair, and his equip- 
ment includes wagons, two-horse plows, and several small plows. 
While he can neither read nor write himself he has sent his chil- 
dren to school and has kept his grown sons in the country where 
they own smaller farms of their own. 

Another farmer, also successful, owns 60 acres of land and 
values his place at $1,400. He rotates wheat with corn and 
grazes his land the third year and uses both manure and a chem- 
ical fertilizer. He sold his crop from thirty acres last year, after 
taking out what was needed for his own use, for nearly $300. 
He is 77 years old and was raised in slavery, but has gradually 
acquired this little farm which affords him and his wife a good 
living. His children have not remained in the country. H. T., 
typical of the less prosperous farmers but thrifty, owns three 
acres and rents six. He sold his crop last year for $50 and 
enough poultry and eggs to bring the total to $90. His daughter, 
the only child living with him, helps him by her washing and the 
three people live comfortably on the income. His house and out- 
houses are in good repair and his place, including equipment, is 
worth $1,200. Another thrifty negro questioned is a breeder 
and on his six acres of land raises enough corn and hay to feed 
a jack, a cow, and a horse, besides a large garden for his own 
use. His income is about $15 per month which is increased to 
about $20 by his wife's washing. J. K., who owns 22 acres of 
land and a home worth about $1,000, makes a good living for a 
family of twelve on his own land and fifty adjoining acres which 
he farms on shares. He raises wheat, corn, and stock and last 
year received $350 for his share of the crop. In his large garden 



74 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

he raises more than enough for his own use and his wife cans 
both fruit and vegetables for the winter. 

These instances of negro farmers in the county are not excep- 
tional but typical of the upper group who work hard and practice 
thrift. Of the twenty four interviewed about half have a money 
income of over $200 and in some cases it is over $300. Among 
the other half the incomes are found dropping as low as $50 and 
reporting no other means of support. These, however, are usually 
so ignorant of all things connected with money that their state- 
ments can hardly be relied upon. By the sale of chickens, an 
occasional hog, or by an odd job probably all of them pick up 
enough to make their annual income total $100 which, from ob- 
servation, seems to be about the minimum. With the help of a 
garden, chickens, and hogs a family of four or five can live with 
reasonable comfort on this amount. 

In general, then, it may be said that the negro farmers in Ri- 
vanna District range all the way from those whose incomes are 
large enough to afford a good living and an opportunity to lay 
something away to those who are contented to eke out a bare 
existence by raising a little corn on rocky land and earning a 
dollar or two here and there wherever opportunity offers. But 
even this class, which is decidedly poorer than the home owning 
farm hand class, is better off than the same under group in the 
cities. With a garden and a few chickens, and a wife to do the 
work, they can make a living in spite of their shiftlessness, and 
being removed from many of the temptations of the city they 
can not become such heavy burdens on society. 

There are no negro lawyers in the county and no negro doctors 
in the negro communities studied. There is, however, a negro 
doctor in Charlottesville, a graduate of Harvard and respected 
by both races, who has some considerable practice -among the 
negroes in the county. Both of the preachers interviewed were 
farmers rather than ministers, but both were reasonably well in- 
formed and one was very intelligent. He has no regular church 
but preaches around at various places for whatever is given him. 
His living he makes from a farm of 23 acres and the help of his 
daughter who is a house servant. The other preacher is buying 
a farm. They both appear to be intelligently interested in the 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 75 

welfare of their people. One gave his politics as Republican, 
while the other, who said he was going to vote the Democratic 
ticket hereafter, frankly said that most negroes were Republicans 
through ignorance. 

Of the 53 negro teachers in Albemarle County 40 are women. 
In the Rivanna District there are 12 negro teachers, of whom 3 
are men and 9 are women. The average salary paid to negro 
teachers is $26.87, the average for negro men being $28.50 and 
that for negro women $24.90 for an average session of 6.8 
months. The highest salary paid to a negro is $45 which is paid 
to the principal of the Union Ridge School in Charlottesville Dis- 
trict. 

All of the negroes who are in the professions occupy high po- 
sitions with the members of their race. The negro preacher is 
probably the most influential of all, and there was hardly a negro 
visited who did not speak with a certain amount of awe and 
pride of "the reverend so-and-so." The negro doctor of Char- 
lottesville is known, by reputation at least, and held in high es- 
teem by practically every negro in the Rivanna District. 

Of the skilled workmen visited there were seven carpenters, 
one brick worker, one cement worker, one linesman, and two 
chauffeurs. Two of the carpenters are skilled workmen earning 
$2.50 and $3 per day, one of them having learned the trade at 
the Petersburg Normal and Industrial School and the other in 
Cleveland, Ohio. Of the remaining five, three are regularly em- 
ployed as carpentry workers at $1.50 per day while the other two 
work at odd jobs for the same wages. All seven own their 
homes, and farm from seven to ten acres of land. With gardens, 
poultry, and a few head of livestock, their condition is, generally 
speaking, about the same as that of the better class of farm 
operators. 

The brick worker interviewed is regularly employed in the 
Charlottesville yards at $2.50 per day. He owns his place some 
ten miles from town with 65 acres worth about $1,500. About 
thirty acres of his place is planted in wheat and corn and is tended 
by his brother who lives on an adjoining farm. In the same sec- 
tion, J. W., a cement worker who is regularly employed at $3 
per day has ten acres of land with a good house and orderly 



76 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

premises. The telephone linesman, who is reported here rather 
than among the common laborers, is regularly employed in Char- 
lottesville at $1.50 per day and his place, some seven miles south 
of town, is worth about $350 including three acres of land. He 
raises on this little place his own vegetables, meat, and lard. Of 
the two chauffeurs reported, one owns a two acre place well 
stocked with poultry and worth about $300, and the other owns 
a place worth about $3,000, but does not live there with his fam- 
ily. 

Here, as in the case of the merchants, it is probably due to 
the character of the negroes who enter these callings, rather than 
to the callings themselves, that makes the class as a whole pros- 
perous. With a home and several acres of land in the country 
they are able to make a large part of their living on their gardens, 
poultry, and hogs. These items, added to their already higher 
nominal wages, give them a real wage considerably higher than 
any other class of the negro rural population unless, perhaps, the 
store keepers. 

The laborers in the county may be divided roughly into three 
classes : ( 1 ) farm laborers, working regularly either throughout 
the year or during nine months of the year for $.75 per day, 
(2) railway and road laborers who work as section hands or on 
the county roads for $1.50 per day, and (3) those who work at 
odd jobs for $.75 and $1 per day. Of the negro rural land own- 
ers visited there were 41 of the first class, 20 of the second, and 
21 of the third. 

A few of the most prosperous homes in the Rivanna District 
were found to belong to the negroes of the first class, i. e. farm 
hands. One negro who was interviewed, for instance, works 
regularly as a farm hand and his wife washes for two families 
for which she receives $5 per month. This brings the family in- 
come in money to about $23 ; and on his place, which is worth 
about $500 and includes six acres of land, he has a garden and 
some 75 chickens. But "if I didn't can things for the winter," 
he said, "I would certainly go to the poor-house." As this well 
illustrates, he is one of the more thrifty class which comprises 
about 30 or 40% of the home owning farm laborers. An ex- 
ample of the less thrifty 60 or 70% is L. B. who owns two acres 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 77 

of very good land and receives $.75 per day for about nine 
months of the year. But his garden is poor, he cans no fruit or 
vegetables, and his livestock and poultry is limited to about ten 
hens of the poorest variety. The small land owners who work 
out on white farms fall, therefore, between these two extremes. 4 
By exercising thrift they can, and many of them do, accumulate 
enough for neat and orderly little homes. But for the less in- 
dustrious their little piece of land offers no opportunity ; they 
are content to live from hand to mouth on their bare wage of 
$.75 per day. 

Conditions among the second class, i. e. section and road hands 
who received $1.50 per day. are much the same. Those who 
work regularly and take advantage of the possibilities of their 
own land do well, while those who work only part of the year 
and make no attempt to supplement their income with gardens 
and poultry manage to "scrape along" on an income of from $12 
to $15 per month and allow their places to run down. R. M., 
for instance, who works regularly as a section hand, owns a place 
of four acres with garden and chickens worth about $400 and 
spends about S30 per month to support his family. L. S., on the 
other hand, does not work regularly, and while he makes a pre- 
tense at a garden, its production is small and he is compelled to 
buy the groceries and canned goods that he should raise. He 
spends, according to his own calculations, about $17 per month, 
or all that he makes. In one case it is a matter of working every 
day and then spending what is necessary ; in the other, $17 is 
spent and then the necessary amount of work is done. 

The third class of laborers mentioned, twenty-one in number, 
with hardly any exceptions, live from hand to mouth and make 
practically nothing from the soil. The same type exists every- 
where and they are no different in Albemarle County. Woofter 
describes the same class in Athens, Ga. : "All of these laborers 
look upon themselves as doing 'public work.' That is to say, they 
shift their employment as the public demands. Many of this 
class work only when they can not see where the next meal is 
comine from. This means that in many instances some other 



4. See below, 19. 



78 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

member of the family besides the father has to seek some steady 
source of income, such as washing or domestic service. The 
majority of this group are of the most shiftless class." B 

The shiftless class just referred to is very largely responsible 
for the 28 wives of the 103 negro landowners who find it neces- 
sary to take in washing and for the 6 who act as house servants. 
And the reason for the inefficiency of the modern negro servants 
is to be explained, very largely, by the fact that they come from 
this shiftless class. As has been so often pointed out, domestic 
service has, in the estimation of the negroes, dropped from the 
highest to the lowest place since 1860. Formerly the domestics 
were the picked slaves ; now they are apt to come from the fam- 
ilies of the most worthless class. DuBois summarizes the situa- 
tion as follows : "The negroes are coming to regard the work 
as a relic of slavery and degrading, and only enter it from sheer 
necessity, and then as a makeshift. Employers find an increas- 
ing number of careless and impudent young people who neglect 
their work, and in some cases show vicious tendencies, and de- 
moralize the children of the families. * * * The servants, 
receiving less than they think they ought, are often careful to 
render as little for it as possible." ° Real wages are, on the other 
hand, very high and it is probably not an overstatement to say 
that domestic service is as costly in Albemarle County as in any 
other rural portion of the United States. 7 The remedy for such 
well paid inefficiency lies, of course, in finding a modern substi- 
tute for the domestic training that was formerly given in the 
master's kitchen. 8 From the negroes' standpoint, except for the 
very thrifty families, domestic service was, in the cases observed, 
always a makeshift. 

Carrying out the enumeration used in the Sandy Springs Re- 
port, 9 questions were asked to obtain the data for the three con- 



5. Woofter, "The Negroes of Athens, Ga.," 41. 

6. W. E. B. DuBois, "Negroes of Farmville, Va.," Bulletin De- 
partment of Labor, No. 14, 21. 

7. This is the opinion of people who have lived elsewhere and have 
considered the elements entering into the real wages of the negroes. 

8. Virginia Church, "The Servant Question," Press of the Hamp- 
ton Institute, 1912. 

9. W. T. Thorn, "The Negroes of Sandy Springs, Md.," 85. 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP /V 

ceptions of the word "family:" (1 ) the possible family, i. e. the 
parents and all children ever born to them living; (2) the real 
family, i. e. the parents and all children living at present; and 
(3) the economic family, i. e. all persons, related or unrelated, 
living under one roof under the conditions of family life. For 
this purpose it is the economic family that is of importance and 
this, compared with that of Sandy Springs, and of Farmville, is 
given in the table below. The resulting average of persons per 
economic family seems to be too low when compared with the 
Sandy Springs family, but it is higher than that shown in the 
Farmville Report. 

TABLE XVII: NUMBER AND SIZE OF ECONOMIC FAMILIES 

INTERVIEWED IN RIVANNA DISTRICT COMPARED 

WITH SANDY SPRINGS AND FARMVILLE.i" 



Rivanna 

Family of Fam. Per. 

1 member ~ 2 

2 members 21 42 

:; members 21 63 

4 members H 44 

5 members 13 65 

6 members 9 54 

7 members 10 70 

8 members 5 40 

9 members 6 54 

10 members 3 30 

11 members 

12 members 1 12 

13 members 1 13 

14 members 

Total 103 4.89 

Average 4.74 



s. s 




Farmville 


•am. 


Per. 


Fam 


Per. 


9 


9 


13 


13 


19 


3S 


52 


104 


20 


60 


34 


102 


17 


68 


4S 


192 


23 


115 


31 


155 


26 


156 


26 


156 


14 


98 


19 


133 


9 


7° 


16 


128 


15 


135 


11 


99 


5 


50 


5 


50 


5 


55 


7 


77 


1 


12 






1 


13 






1 


14 






1.65 


8.95 


2.62 


12.09 




5.42 




4.61 



Out of 103 economic families questioned in the Rivanna Dis- 
trict there are 66, or 64^ c , of from 2 to 5 members while the 
same percentages for Sandy Springs and Farmville are 4S and 
63 respectively. Since we are here dealing with a rural district 



10. The figures for Sandy Springs and Farmville are taken from 
Labor Department Bulletin, No. 32, "The Negroes of Sandy Springs. ' 



80 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

we would expect conditions to approximate those of Sandy 
Springs rather than those of Farmville, and the fact that the eco- 
nomic family is a little smaller in the Rivanna District is prob- 
ably to be accounted for by the fact that few grown children or 
otherwise dependent people were found among the families inter- 
viewed. The families usually consisted only of the parents and 
children not yet old enough to be economically independent. 

The table of number of families by size of family and annual 
income, which follows, must be taken with a good many grains 
of precaution. For the laborers, storekeepers, and artisans the 
estimates are reasonably accurate but for the others it is largely 
a matter of guess-work and in some instance is probably too low. 

TABLE XVIII: NUMBER OF FAMILIES INTERVIEWED BY 
SIZE AND ANNUAL INCOME. 



1 mem- over 

Annual income ber 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Total 

$50 or less 1 

$50 to $100 

$100 to $150 

$150 to $200 

$200 to $250 

$250 to $350 

$350 to $450 

over $450 

Not reported 1 3 7 11 13 

Total 2 21 21 11 13 9 10 5 6 5 103 



Of 90 Rivanna Families, 14, or 15.5%, made incomes of less 
than $100. The same percentage in Farmville was found to be 
10.7%, but even granted that these estimates are correct, it does 
not follow that the Rivanna negroes are in a poorer economic 
condition, because in the country the money income does not 
represent the real income. In the Rivanna District, judging from 
those questioned, 54.4^,* of the negroes make between $100 and 
$250, while in Sandy Springs 61 <f of them and in Farmville 
34.8% of them make this amount. In comparing all of these 
figures it must be remembered that no account is taken of the 
gardens, poultry, and hogs which, in about 70fo of the cases, 
supplement materially the incomes of the Albemarle negroes. 



6 


1 


o 


2 






1 






2 
12 


g 


3 




o 


>^ 




1 






10 


3 


o 


3 


3 


2 


4 




1 


2 


20 


3 


4 


1 


3 


2 


3 


2 


1 




19 


3 


2 


1 


2 


g 




1 


>> 




13 


1 




2 


1 








2 


2 


7 




2 


1 






2 






1 


7 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 



81 



Taking these things into consideration the real income is easily 
in excess of that in Sandy Springs and the economic family is 
only 87. 4% as large as in that community. Taking these things 
into consideration, and the difference in the purchasing power of 
money since the time that the Sandy Springs study was made, 
the income per economic family is approximately the same as in 
Sandy Springs, a semi-rural community. In both cases there is 
a variation for the better from conditions shown to exist in 
Farmville, a town in Prince Edward County. 11 

The following budgets of family expenditures are selected from 
a number which were obtained from the negroes in Riivanna Dis- 
trict : 

TABLE XIX: BUDGETS OF FAMILY EXPENDITURES. 

Income Expenditures 

Items Amts. Items. Amts. 

Man's wages (odd jobs) $120.00 Food $216.00 

Sale of crop 200.00 Clothes 120.00 

Wife's washing (52 weeks Church 12.00 

@ $1.50) 78.00 Liquor 3.00 

Tobacco 4.00 

Lodge 13.00 

Doctor's bill 2.00 

Patent medicines 6.00 

Fuel 15.00 

Balance 17.00 

Total $398.00 Total $398.00 

Income (shoemaker) ... $300.00 Food $156.00 

Clothes 72.00 

Church 12.00 

Liquor 6.00 

Tobacco 3.00 

Lodge 15.00 

Doctor's bill 5.00 

Patent medicines 3.00 

Fuel 15.00 

Balance 13.00 

Total $300.00 Total $300.00 

11. W. E. B. DuBois, "The Negroes of Farmville, Va.." Labor De- 
partment Bulletin, No. 14. 

—6 



82 



PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 



Man (laborer) . . . 
Woman (washing) 



flSO.OO 
36.00 



Total 



Woman (washing) 
Sale of eggs, etc. . . 



$216.00 

$ 48.00 
50.00 



Total $ 98.00 



Food $120.00 

Clothes 60.00 

Church 3.00 

Tobacco 1.20 

Lodge 4.80 

Doctor's bills 3.00 

Patent medicines 3.00 

Fuel 12.00 

Balance 9.00 

Total $216.00 

Food $ 60.00 

Clothes 12.00 

Church 2.40 

Lodge 10. SO 

Doctor's bill 2.00 

Fuel 9.00 

Balance 1.80 

Total $ 98.00 



While the budgets are derived more or less from the imperfect 
memory of the negro informants and can not therefore be con- 
sidered as absolutely accurate, they at least give an idea of how 
the negroes in the county divide their incomes. Taking the 
average for twenty families, whose accounts are most apt to be 
accurate, we can obtain the percentage of total outlay for the 
five classes of expenditure, which, when compared with the con- 
ditions shown to exist in Athens, Ga., 12 indicate that the country 
negroes are more thrifty than those in the cities. 

TABLE XX: EXPENDITURES OF RIVANNA AND ATHENS 
NEGROES COMPARED. 



Item Rivanna Athens 

% of total outlay % total outlay 

Food 49% 29% 

Clothing 24 8 

Fuel 3 5 

Lodging 5 

Insurance " 3 

Miscellaneous 17 50 

1009fc 100% 



12. Woofter, "The Negroes of Athens, Ga.." 50-51. 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 83 

From this it would appear that the ratios of Engle's Law 13 
come much nearer being approximated by the rural negroes in 
Rivanna District than is the case in Athens. This is as would 
be expected since the naturally wasteful tendencies of the negro 
are curbed in the rural districts by the absence of many of the 
temptations. In the following table is given the amounts spent 
for five classes of expenditures in Athens, Rivanna, and by the 
people of the United States in general who earn about the same 
incomes. 

TABLE XXI: EXPENDITURES OF NEGROES OF RIVANNA, 

OF ATHENS, AND OF NORMAL FAMILIES 

IN THE U. S." 

Rivanna Athens U. S. Inc. U. S. Inc. 

Food 49% 

Clothing 24 

Lodging 

Fuel and lights 3 

Miscellaneous 24 

100% 

"The negro's standard of living, in Athens, is so low that he 
is able to spend the bulk of his earnings not on the necessities 
of life, but on pleasure and recreation." This condition, as far 
as it is possible to judge from limited investigations, does not 
exist to any great extent in the rural district ten miles from 
Charlottesville. The amount spent for food closely approxi- 
mates that eiven as normal for the United States. The fact that 





under $200 


$3 


to $400 


29% 


49.64% 




45.59 


8 


15.48 




14.98 


5 


12.82 




14.14 


5 


8.08 




7.02 


53 


13.98 




18.27 


00% 


100% 




100% 



13. Investigations made by LePlay (1855), Engle (1857), and by 
the U. S. Commissioner of Labor (1891) all seem to agree with the 
following general inferences drawn by Engle: (1) As the income of 
a family increases a smaller amount is spent for food, and the ex- 
penditure for clothes remains practically the same. (2) The ex- 
penditure for rent, fuel, and light remains practically the same. (3) 
With increased income an increasing amount is spent for education, 
health, amusements, etc. 

14. The figures for Athens are taken from Woofter, Ibid, pp. 51, 
and those for normal families in the U. S. are from the Report of 
the U. S. Commissioner of Agriculture for 1891. 



84 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

the negroes raise much of their food would tend to raise this 
percentage, but this is probably overbalanced by the errors made 
by the negroes reporting by including other grocery store pur- 
chases such as oil, soap, matches, and the like with food. In the 
rural districts there is, of course, no such thing as a "service 
basket" which is given as one of the reasons for the low ex- 
penditure for food in Athens. The difference in the amount 
spent for clothes is considerable and the estimates given by the 
Rivanna negroes are probably too high. There is this to be noted, 
however: in towns where the negroes are largely house servants 
they are practically clothed by gifts while in the rural districts 
there is practically none of this. Furthermore, probably much 
of the money that is spent for lodging and incidentals in the cities 
is, in the country, to be registered in this column. The low 
amount expended for fuel is accounted for by the fact that many 
of the negroes cut their own wood from woodland or earn wood 
by chopping for the whites. The principal items included under 
"miscellaneous" for the Rivanna District are church, lodge (which 
is a form of insurance), doctor's bills, liquor, patent medicines 
and tobacco. The negroes in these sections seldom go to town 
and the proverbial "cheap prints, organs, and bric-a-brac" are, 
in this section at least, lacking. Thriftlessness, in the rural dis- 
tricts of Albemarle, makes itself noticeable not in the money 
wasted, but in what is never earned by the practice of numerous 
little economies on the farms. 

In trying to analyse a population for its thrift, whether it 
lives in the "hand to mouth" manner or whether it is looking 
out for the future, we are accustomed to look for three things: 
(1) savings in money and property (2) insurance, and (3) to 
what extent an effort is made to produce the maximum wealth 
from the natural resources. We will examine briefly each of 
these as found among the negroes in the Rivanna District. 

Of the 103 heads of families questioned only six had bank 
accounts, three being savings accounts and three current accounts. 
No attempt was made to ascertain what earnings had been put 
into property, but several of those interviewed had added to their 
holdings in the past year. In the matter of insurance conditions 
are much better. Of the 103 negro heads of families visited, 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 85 

72 belong to some kind of a lodge which pays from $1.50 
to $5.00 per week in case of sickness and funeral expenses in 
case of death. In addition to these 29 other negroes, who are not 
heads of families, carry such insurance. "The Southern Aid" 
with dues of 25 cents per week pays $5 per week in case of sick- 
ness and $70 at death; "St. Lukes," a mutual Society with dues 
of 25 cents per month pays from $1.50 to $2 per week in case of 
sickness and $100 at death. A great majority of the negroes 
interviewed belonged to one of these organizations, and others 
represented were "The Odd Fellows" with its widows and or- 
phans insurance, "The Central Relief," "The Providential Relief 
Association," "The Richmond Beneficial," etc. The rates in all 
of these societies are, as insurance, excessive, but they serve as 
social organizations as well, and their protection, if not altogether 
certain and very expensive, is much better than nothing. As 
for fire insurance it was found that most of the negroes whose 
houses were of any value had them insured ; few of those in log 
or inferior frame houses did. 

In the country it is under the third heading where we should 
expect to find the greatest opportunity for the exercise of thrift. 
Here, indeed, there is the opportunity and those negroes who 
make the most of it do well while those who do not live poorly 
and accumulate nothing. Among the land owners interviewed 
there were only three without some kind of a garden and only 
eleven without a few chickens. But the gardens range all the 
way from a poorly scratched patch of corn and onions to those 
which are large and well cultivated and raise all kinds of vegeta- 
bles. L. M., for instance, who is not a regular farmer but an 
outside laborer as well, canned 100 cans of peas, corn, snaps, and 
tomatoes from his own garden for winter use. For all of the 
families except those of the most improvident class the number 
of chickens ranges from fifteen to thirty and a few of the farm- 
ers have a hundred or more. If there is anyone thing which 
might be taken as an index to the thrift of the negroes in this 
section, it is, perhaps, whether or not they keep any hogs. Of 
those interviewed 36 did not and 67 did ; and of those interviewed 
just about two thirds showed some evidence of a conscious e f- 
fort to improve their conditions, while the balance seemed con- 



86 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

tent to live in more or less squalor and work only when neces- 
sary. 

The occupations which employ the rural negroes of Albemarle 
County have been outlined and, in the survey of family econom- 
ics, it has been shown that for the industrious the incomes are 
sufficient to form the "nest egg" for economic independence. 
When such answers as "God Almighty knows," "all we can get," 
and the like are given to the questions asked relative to the differ- 
ent elements in the family expenditures, it is a mistake to place 
too much emphasis on the results ascertained. 

But this much is obvious: (1) In the county there are fewer 
abnormalities in the negro's budget than in the city, and: (2) 
Even in the country, where a larger amount goes for necessities 
and less for incidentals, the standard of living is not sufficiently 
high to make all of the negroes work all of the time. Jackson 
Davis, the Supervisor of Rural Education in Virginia, says that 
"if only one third of their land (negroes') could be brought to 
its proper degree of production it ought to add to the wealth of 
the state by something like fifteen or twenty per cent." ls What- 
ever the amounts, the principle that inefficient producers are a 
drain on the wealth of the people as a whole remains the same. 
The problem, therefore, is to so diversify the wants of the negro 
producer that he will put forth his best efforts to attain them. 
But as a race the negroes are inferior in efficiency and they will 
always have to stand away from the effects of white competition. 
It is in the country, on the small farms and in the semi-skilled 
trades, where the negroes, better educated and with better indus- 
trial training, must try to make their place. Here the effect of 
white competition is reduced to a minimum and the absence of 
temptation curbs many of their weaknesses. 



15. In an address delivered at the Rural Life Conference at the 
University of Virginia, 1911. 



\\ 



CHAPTER VI. 
Social Conditions. 

The sanitary conditions in the negro communities in the 
county, are, as is apt to be the case in the rural districts, far 
better than in the towns and cities. There is, of course, a great 
diversity in the cleanliness and orderliness of the places. The 
premises of those negro owners of the upper group are usually 
tidy and well kept, while those of the lower group are apt to 
be dirty and the fences and outhouses in poor repair. 

Of the 103 homes visited, 65 were either painted or white- 
washed and 32 were unpainted. 36 of the former group were 
well painted and the remainder were whitewashed. Notice was 
also taken of the condition of the outhouses and fences, and the 
fences were arbitrarily classed as in "good condition,*' "fair con- 
dition," "poor condition, and "no fences." There were of the 
first group 60: 13 were classed as fair, and on 27 of the places 
there were either no fences or they were in a very "run-down" 
condition. Throughout the observations this approximate ratio 
of two families who show some degree of thrift to one that 
is totally shiftless seems to hold good. 

The houses occupied by the families in the rural districts of 
Albemarle County which were visited contain from two to ten 
rooms, the greater number being of from three to five rooms. 
There is an average number of occupants per room of 1.1 per- 
sons, while in Sandy Springs the same average is 1.26 and in 
Athens it is 1.32. 1 The following table shows the distribution 
of the families in the houses : 

Many of the two and three room houses are log built, but 
not a majority of them. A majority of the three and four room 
houses are two story frame buildings with one room on each 
floor and a shed kitchen. Such houses are, indeed, typical of 
the negroes — thev insist on having two stories if there is only 



1. Thorn, 91 and Woofter, 17. 

87 



88 



PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 



TABLE XXII: FAMILIES BY SIZE OF FAMILY AND NUM- 
BER OF ROOMS TO A HOUSE AMONG THE 103 
FAMILIES VISITED IN THE RIVANNA 
DISTRICT. 



Families according to houses of 



Two 
Size of fam. rooms 

1 member 

2 members 4 

3 members 3 

4 members 

5 members 3 

6 members 1 

7 members 1 

8 members 

9 members 1 

10 members 

12 members 

13 members 

Total families 13 

Total rooms 26 



6 7 



10 



5 3 


1 


2 




o 


1 




4 2 


4 


2 










6 7 


1 












1 3 


5 


1 




o 






1 3 


1 


3 










1 1 




3 




1 






1 "^ 


1 


1 










1 2 


1 


1 










2 


1 










1 


1 














21 27 


15 


13 


4 


6 


1 


1 


63 108 


75 


78 


28 


48 


9 


10 



Xot 

rep't Total 
2 

2 21 

16 

14 

16 

9 

8 

6 

6 

3 

1 

1 

2 103 

445* 



one room above. Most of the houses above three rooms are 
fairly good frame buildings usually painted or whitewashed and 
in good repair. The rooms, in the best of the houses, are of 
fair size, well ventilated, and fairly well furnished. Careful no- 
tice was taken of the furnishings which, in point of neatness 
and repair, were found to correspond very closely to the fences, 
outhouses, and exterior of the houses. We would naturally ex- 
pect to find these conditions better among home owning country 
negroes than among city renters and, as far as can be judged 
from observation, they are materially better. That the houses 
are less crowded is shown by comparing the figures for Athens: 
there two and three room houses are the most usual while in 
Albemarle County three and four room houses prevail. In 
Athens 93% of the families live in houses of fewer than five 
rooms while among those families in Albemarle County visited 
the same percentage was 73. No case was found where two 



*Not including rooms occupied by 2 families not reported. 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 



89 



distinct families occupied one house though in several instances 
there was one or more outside member. 

Again, as would be expected in the country, the conditions of 
sanitation are far better than are shown by observation in Char- 
lottesville. As a rule the houses in the country are fairly clean 
and not more than ten per cent, of them appear to be unclean 
to the point of endangering health. The ventilation is always 
good and, since the negro communities are usually on ridges 
rather than in the bottoms, the drainage is good. Particular 
notice was taken of the privies which were found, in most cases, 
to be built at a reasonably safe distance from the house and 
water supply and in sanitary condition. In the 103 homes visited 
there had not been a single case of typhoid fever for over two 
years and, as far as the memory of the informants can be 
trusted, there had only been six deaths from it in the present 
families. The water supply is usually either from wells or 
springs on the premises or those of neighbors. Judging from 
the typhoid record the supply is evidently free from pollution. - 

The Negro Organization Society has undertaken, and is carry- 
ing through, an extensive program for the betterment of health 
conditions among the negroes throughout the state. At the 
request of this society the Department of Health of Virginia 
annually issues a handbook of health especially adapted for use 
among the colored people and distributes it among them gratis. 
It contains instructions of how to keep the springs and wells 
clean, how to construct sanitary privies, instructions in venti- 
lation, personal cleanliness, etc. The society has also under- 
taken the organization of a league among the negroes, the mem- 
bers of which will pledge themselves to build a sanitary privy, 
to provide adequate fresh air, to keep the body clean, and to 
protect the water supply. The effect of these movements will 
undoubtedly be beneficial to the negroes in both town and coun- 
try. 

The moral and sanitary conditions in the homes are, normally. 



2. A careful investigation of this is being made in conjunction with 
the school census. The results will be published with those of the 
sociological survey now being undertaken by the public institutions 
of the county and city. 



90 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

in large measure determined by the character of the women 
who, under present social conditions, are the home-makers. Im- 
morality or much outside work on the part of the housewives 
would naturally be expected to entail evil consequences. As 
has been seen only six housewives work out regularly and the 
remainder can, if they so desire, give most of their time to mak- 
ing their houses homes. Conjugal conditions also affect the 
home environment and it is important to notice the extent of 
widowhood, separation, and illegitimacy. The following con- 
ditions were found among those families visited: 80, or 77.7 c / 
married or living together as man and wife; 15 or 14.6% of 
the heads of families either widows or widowers; 5 or 4.8% 
separated; and there were 3 or 2.9 c / women unmarried with 
children. Compared with similar statistics for other localities 
the percentage of illegitimacy is low in the Rivanna District, 
and the percentage of men and women living together as man 
and wife is high. There are eleven widows and four widowers 
not married again. Now, where illegitimacy and separation are 
low and where few of the women have to give all of their time 
to breadwinning, we should expect to find home conditions pro- 
portionately better. Add to this the abundance of fresh air 
and room afforded in the country and it is apparent that, whiie 
conditions are much better here than in the towns, there is yet 
room for much improvement. Industry and frugality on the 
part of the women who can devote their time to the home should 
bring these results in direct proportion as they are practiced. 
These, however, are characteristics biologically lacking in the 
negroes and must, if the best results are to be expected, be sup- 
plied by domestic training in the schools. 

Illiteracy among the negroes, as is shown by the figures for 
the different ages, is decreasing with remarkable rapidity, but 
there are still a very large number unable to read and write. 
The following table shows the conditions of illiteracy in Albe- 
marle County, exclusive of Charlottesville, in 1910: 3 



3. This table was prepared especially by the Census Bureau and 
is not to be found in any printed report. 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 91 

TABLE XXIII: AGE AND LITERACY OF NEGROES FOR AL- 
BEMARLE COUNTY. 



Males Females Total % 

10 to 20 years 

Literate 1,046 1,226 2.272 85.6 

Illiterate 237 147 384 14.4 

21 years and over 

Literate 1.180 1.335 2,515 57.1 

Illiterate 893 1,002 1,895 42.9 

Total 

Literate 2,226 2,561 4.787 07.7 

Illiterate 1,130 1,149 2,279 32.3 

The last tabulated statistics in the office of the Division Su- 
perintendent of Schools 4 shows a total school population in Al- 
bemarle County of 10,211, of whom 6,573 are white and 3,638 
are negroes. The total number of whites enrolled is 4,120 or 
62% and the total number of negro children enrolled is 1,860 
or 51 °f - Both of these percentages, however, are too low be- 
cause some 850 children from the county attend school in Char- 
lottesville. Few negro children above the age of fifteen attend, 
which in part accounts for their low percentage of enrollment. 
The absence of school facilities for children of this age was, 
by the way, the occasion of critical comments from several of 
the negroes interviewed. The percentage of daily attendance 
throughout the session is ?7 .4 ' ', for the whites and 70.9% for 
the negroes, the advantage in favor of the negroes being ex- 
plained by the fact that they live in communities, which makes 
school attendance in bad weather comparatively easy, while many 
of the whites live at greater distances from the schools, and 
by the fact that more white children are taken out of schooi 
in the spring to work on the farms. For the 4,120 white chil- 
dren 72 schools are open and for the 1.860 negroes there are 
43 schools. For the whites there is one teacher for every 23 
pupils and one to every 3? negro pupils. 



4. For this and the succeeding information I am indebted to Mr. 
H. M. McMannaway, Division Supt. of Schools. 



92 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

The average salary paid white teachers is $43.65 and the av- 
erage salary paid the negro teachers is $26.87. The minimum 
salary paid to negro teachers is $20 per month which is paid 
to the emergency teachers. There are among the 53 negro teach- 
ers in the county 25 who have attended Hampton, Petersburg, 
Lynchburg, or the Hartshorne School in Richmond and most 
of these are fairly well trained. The others have been trained 
in the local schools, and, as a whole, are not capable instructors. 

The length of the negro session is about the same as that 
for the whites in the lower grades and, throughout the county, 
averages about 6.2 months. Many of the schools in the county, 
both white and negro, are helped by private subscription to con- 
tinue for a longer session. The county agrees to furnish the 
balance for an extra month to each community which will raise 
one-half of the necessary expenses. As a result of this system 
there was, last year, a 26^, increase in the number of days ac- 
tually taught. 

Next session three of the negro schools will go through the 
eighth grade, seven through the seventh grade, and thirty-two 
through the fifth, while one will carry two years of high school 
work and will be used as a training school for teachers and a 
state certificate will be issued. This school will be operated 
with the assistance of the John F. Slater Fund, which will as- 
sist several such schools next session according to the following 
conditions recently announced by its director: "For the next 
session we propose to aid in about thirty, provided the reasonable 
conditions are fulfilled. These conditions * * * are that 
the school property shall belong to the state or county, thus fix- 
ing the school as a part of the public school system; second, 
that there shall be an appropriation of at least $750 from the 
public funds for maintenance: third, that the teaching shall be 
carried strictly and honestly through the eighth grade, including 
industrial work, and in the last year some training, however 
elementary, for the work of teaching. Under these conditions 
the Slater Fund has agreed to appropriate $500 for mainte- 
nance, and in the first year, where new buildings or repairs may 
be necessary, to aid in supplying these in cooperation with 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 93 

amounts raised from other sources." 5 

One object of the questionaire was to ascertain to what ex- 
tent old negroes who never went to school have learned how to 
read, and to what extent those who have been to school con- 
tinue to read. To the question "can you read," the answer "a 
little" was given both by old negroes who had never been to 
school and by a few who had been to school. Several were 
found who could read, but who could not write, and one man 
said that he could read printing but not writing. These are 
the negroes who have acquired it without ever having gone to 
school. 

A question was asked relative to whether or not a newspaper 
or magazine was regularly received in the home. It was found 
that at least one paper went regularly into 34 homes, but in only 
five cases was it a farm journal. In 17 of the homes visited, 
The Charlottesville Messenger, a newspaper published by a 
negro in Charlottesville, was read, and in 12 others the papers 
subscribed to were : The Charlottesville Progress, The Toledo 
Blade, The New York World, The Kansas City Star, The Wash- 
ington Post, etc. 

Twenty-eight of the negro men answered that they voted, and 
all but one gave their politics as Republican. The greatest possi- 
ble ignorance was shown in some of the discussions that the 
literate landowners volunteered in answer to this question. One 
declared that no colored people were allowed to vote and that 
"they used to be but not now." In another home, where the 
questions were answered by a woman who was above the av- 
erage in intelligence, the whole family except one daughter 
seemed firmly convinced that the negroes were disfranchised, 
and when the little girl said that so and so voted, her mother 
answered that "he must be a democrat." In the matter of party 
affiliation a still greater ignorance is shown ; many of them ac- 
tually seem to think that the Democrats wash to re-enslave them 
and that the Republicans are God-sent saviors to the race. 

This is, of course, a heritage of the Reconstruction Period, 



5. Report of Director J. H. Dillard, 1915. 



94 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

when the negroes were taught by the unscrupulous adventurers 
from the North and the equally unscrupulous Southerners who 
tried to use the negro vote for their own ends, that their inter- 
ests were inherently opposed to those of the whites, and the 
whites, to maintain their supremacy, were forced to unite in 
one race party regardless of political belief. This caused a gulf, 
politically at least, between the better class of Southern whites 
and the negroes which has never been entirely healed, and which, 
according to Thomas Nelson Page, 6 is the greatest misfortune 
that has ever befallen the negro race in America, not excepting 
its ravishment from its native land. To the whites, on the other 
hand, it meant practical disfranchisement because party names 
were made synonyms for color, and they were no longer able 
to divide on grounds of political belief and economic interests. 
With the partial disfranchisement of the negroes this evil has 
been lessened and there has of recent years developed a very re- 
spectable opposition party. But there can never be two strong 
parties, which are necessary for the welfare of the government, 
until the negroes are disillusioned and divide along the same 
economic lines as the whites with the same economic interests. 
This end will come nearer to realization with the industrial ad- 
vancement of the negroes, because where there is a vital self- 
interest economic considerations will bring about a political di- 
vision. 

The only provision for the industrial training of the rural 
negroes of Albemarle County is a school supervisor of industrial 
work. She receives a salary of $495 for eleven months service 
which is provided jointly by the Jeannes Fund, the General 
Board of Education, and the County Board of Education. While 
this is, of course, very inadequate, it at least shows that the ten- 
dency is toward more practical education for the negroes, and 
the results of her work are very noticeable. She visits the va- 
rious negro schools of the county, gives lessons in some indus- 
try, plans for the regular teacher to give succeeding lessons, 
organizes movements to raise money for longer terms and better 



6. "The Negro: The Southerners' Problem." 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 95 

equipment, and in general looks after the advancement of prac- 
tical education in the county. 

The supervising industrial teacher last year made 130 visits 
to 22 schools in the county and raised $1,127 among the negroes 
for buildings, school extension, and pupils' prizes. In these 
visits she gave lessons in gardening, cooking, sewing and quilt- 
ing, organized canning clubs, gave instructions in health and san- 
itation, etc. In the summer her time is occupied in visiting the 
negro homes in the county, where the same type of instruction 
in domestic economy and gardening is given. 

After all else is said, the fact remains that the negroes, al- 
though a decreasing ratio, form a large part of the population 
of Virginia, and if the agricultural possibilities of the state are 
to be developed, this sort of training must be further extended. 
In theory, at least, it is no new idea. Dr. A. D. Mayo says : "Al- 
most 100 years ago young Thomas Jefferson drew up a scheme 
for the education of the people of Virginia, which, had it been 
adopted, would have changed the history of that and of every 
other state and of the nation. He proposed to emancipate the 
slaves and fit them by industrial training for freedom ; to es- 
tablish a free school for every white child. * * and to 
crown all with a university." But in practice it is a new 
thing and it is only in the last few years that the results at- 
tained at Hampton have been recognized and the same methods 
been put into practice elsewhere. 

The agricultural prosperity of Virginia depends largely on the 
extension of this kind of education which reaches the negroes 
and makes them more efficient producers. "Because our educa- 
tional machinery has failed in the past," says Davis ' "to fit 
the negroes for rural life, wherein lies his greatest opportunity 
for happiness and gain to himself and state, is no reason why 
we should condemn negro education ; but it is an excellent rea- 
son why we should change the character of that education in 
order that the negro may know how to produce more, live better, 
and add to the common wealth of the state." 



7. Jackson Davis in an address delivered before the Rural Life Con- 
ference at the University of Virginia in 1911. 



96 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

It is only to the enthusiast that the negro's religion appears a 
vital force in his progress. Although it is urged by those who 
have studied the question that it is improving with great rapid- 
ity, 8 the religion of the negro is at present one of systematized 
emotion and lacking in ethical import. Christianity is, indeed, 
too new a thing with all primitive peoples to be appreciated be- 
yond its emotional side. Its emotionalism resembles their native 
religion and appeals to their nature, but they have little desire 
for its ethical side and in adopting the outward forms of Chris- 
tianity this has often been omitted. Improved ethical standards 
may be expected to come with a higher standard of living, be- 
cause the immoral disposition is produced in all mentally weak 
people, not by the absence of churches, but by social and eco- 
nomic conditions which force them along the lines of least resist- 
ance. 

Even in its present primitive condition, however, the negro 
church has an important mission among its people. The churches 
and lodges furnish most of the social life for the negroes and, 
since outside of these there is practically no innocent recreation 
for them, this is of the greatest practical importance. Since hu- 
man nature will never tolerate a vacuum, the natural craving for 
recreation must be met, and unless it is cleanly met it is apt to 
seek criminal outlets. Says a wise observer:* "Prohibition is 
good as far as it goes even though in our cities it does not go 
at all. But it will never, by itself, do very much more than just 
slick up life on the outside. It is purely a negative measure, a 
gigantic 'thou shalt not.' " This is equally applicable to every 
form of prohibition and if our statutes deny certain outlets for 
the negro's play instinct society must afford others or else the 
statutes, unsupported by public sentiment, will become, for all 
practical purposes, nul and void. In so far, then, as the churches, 
by their long and emotional Sunday "sessions" and their occa- 
sional "sociables" afford an outlet for the instinct which other- 
wise might go into immoral channels, they are an agency for the 
betterment of the race. The lodges have a similar function. 



8. See Weatherford, "Negro Life in the South." 

9. L. H. Hammond in "In Black and White." 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 97 

One appeals to the negro's nature by its emotionalism and one 
by its ritualism and both, therefore, can afford him a pleasing 
and innocent form of recreation. 

Except for those who were too young and nine more, every 
one of the 487 negroes represented in the families visited claimed 
membership in one of the Baptist Churches of the county. One 
who was not a member had been expelled for "getting drunk" 
and two more did not "care for preaching." These were, in- 
deed, singular exceptions to the rule, because most of the ne- 
groes interviewed said that they never missed a "preaching" or 
a "meeting." And for all of these negroes the church affords a 
community center where the better of them can exchange ideas 
which may be of practical importance. 

Because the church has such a hold on the people there are 
many practical possibilities in it. The negro preacher is a much 
respected and revered person among his people, and with an in- 
telligent and industrious preacher this reverence could be put to 
good use. There are in the state a few negro preachers who 
have been trained at such institutions as Hampton, and their 
ministry is of much greater value to their people than that of 
those who have specialized on a so-called theology. As commu- 
nity leaders they can exert a great influence over their followers 
in habits of frugality, industry, health, and morality. With more 
negro preachers who are well trained in these fundamentals the 
church can, as a social, intellectual, and economic center, exer- 
cise a great influence. 



CHAPTER VII. 
Reflections and Conclusions. 1 

Booker T. Washington, the negro whose wise race leadership, 
will make him long remembered not only as a valued servant to 
his race in America but to the entire South, declared that the 
negro was not given freedom by the Emancipation Proclamation 
but that independence would come only by self earned economic 
emancipation. Stability, thrift, industry and purpose, where 
competition is free, may be said to constitute the prerequisites of 
economic independence. This much granted it follows that the 
environment which will best facilitate the development of these 
traits in a people in which they are more or less organically lack- 
ing but which is still in the plastic stage of social growth is the 
one to be desired. Recognized authorities, who base their opin- 
ion on careful study, are convinced that rural occupations 
offer the best opportunity for the development of these qualities, 
and it is the lesson of history that the roots of civilization must 
be "struck deep into the soil" before the processes of production 
can be mastered or before the most efficient social group can 
develop. Of no less importance are the principles of consump- 
tion — the ability to get the maximum of benefit from the pro- 
ducts of labor — and these were likewise first learned in the culti- 
vation of the soil. 

"We are living in a country where," says Washington, "if we 
are to succeed at all, we are going to do so largely by what we 
raise out of the soil. * * * Plainly, then, the best thing, the 
logical thing, is to turn the larger part of our strength in a di- 
rection that will make the negro among the most skilled agricul- 
tural people in the world. * * * This policy would tend to keep 
the negro in the country and smaller towns, where he succeeds 
best, and stop the influx to the cities, where he does not succeed 



1. The substance of this chapter appeared in an article by the 
writer in the May, 1915, "Southern Workman." 

98 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 99 

so well." - Such quotations as this express the opinions of the 
most capable negro leaders and most thoughtful writers and lie 
at the basis of the methods being pursued at Tuskegee, Hamp- 
ton, and the other lesser schools. Upon examination the rea- 
sons for this opinion seem to fall under four principal heads. 

In the first place there is the question of health. At the pres- 
ent time when the new science of eugenics is being so widely 
discussed it is well to remember that the principles of euthenics 
— or the improvement of the environment — are still necessary 
supplements to race regeneration. Without healthy bodies the 
people cannot develop to their greatest potentialities, and with- 
out healthy bodies the vitality of the generations to come may 
be materially weakened. And the environment — the food, the 
housing, the sanitary conditions — largely determines the condi- 
tion of the body. 

Under present urban conditions, where the struggle for ex- 
istence is severest, the challenge is great to both the white and 
black races ; but it is greatest to the negro, whose power of re- 
sistance has been determined by natural selection acting in a 
different climate and under different conditions. In the case of 
tuberculosis, for instance, there has been a selection against the 
susceptibility to the disease in the white race for thousands of 
years, but it is new to the negroes and consequently works much 
greater havoc. In Washington, D. C. the death rate of negro 
infants from this disease is nearly four and a half times as 
great as that for the whites, and in Virginia there are 221 negroes 
who die from the disease to every 100 whites. The same is 
true of other diseases which are new to the negroes. In Virginia 
negro mortality from lockjaw is over four times as great as 
the white, from syphilis, over three times as great, and from 
dysentery, nearly three times as great. All of these diseases — 
and the others responsible for the sixty per cent, excess of negro 
mortality — are peculiarly prevalent in the cities. 3 The negro in 



2. "The Future of the American Negro." 

3. Dr. Williams, state health commissioner, in his report to Gov- 
ernor Stuart, says: "The tuberculosis rate is lowest among the rural 
white population, next lowest among the urban white population. 



100 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

the city is exposed to them because economic conditions force 
him to live largely in the congested districts, and they are espe- 
cially hazardous to him because he has not evolved the same re- 
sistance by long contact and selection against them. Further- 
more, there are the powerful degenerating forces of alcohol, 
drugs, and vice to which the negro is more susceptible in the 
cities. In short, racial regeneration along euthenic lines for the 
negro is a much simpler problem in the country than in the towns 
and cities ; in the country better health will permit the develop- 
ment of the greatest potentialities. 

The negro's problem is partly biologic: Its solution consists in 
bringing about the proper adjustment between environment and 
racial inheritance. 

Secondly, it may be stated that in the country house tends 
more rapidly to become home, and in proportion as this is true 
there is greater social development. Civilization begins with 
the sense of possession, and possession finds one of its most per- 
fect expressions in the ownership of the home. In the cities this 
is impossible for most negroes — as indeed it is for J;he whites; in 
the country it is a necessary correlative of farm ownership. Ar- 
thur Young has said that a man will make a garden spot of a 
rock in mid-ocean to which he owns title, but that without this 
sense of proprietorship most of his productive labor will be 
wasted. There is much wisdom in this statement. Ownership 
gives the people pride, thrift, and industry ; with pride the house 
takes on the little niceties that make it a home, with thrift small 
savings and economies grow to larger beginnings, and industry 
leads to increased production. 

The development of the race as a social group, furthermore, 
requires that a certain responsibility to fellow-man be developed. 
By giving the landlord an interest in the affairs of society and 
government this moral quality follows directly from proprietor- 
ship, because where there is an interest in the affairs of society 
there is social responsibility. Until this quality is developed in 



with the rural negroes suffering more than the urban whites and 
the city negroes dying at a rate twice as great as that of the rural whites, 
and almost twice as great as that of the urban whites." 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 101 

the race their religion will remain a system of sensationalism 
without morals ; their schools can never become mediums for 
real development ; and there can be no basis for the demand for 
a participation in the social control. According to the early Sax- 
ons the land was the man and by this they meant that the man 
could never be a responsible unit in the group unless he had the 
conservatism engendered by ownership. The shiftlessness of the 
nomad tenants in the Lower South offers a negative illustration 
of this principle ; the thrifty and law-abiding small fanners all over 
the South show the extent to which personal and social efficiency 
can be bred by the pride of ownership. 

The negro's problem is largely social: This consists in de- 
veloping the qualities which will make him responsible to him- 
self and to society. 

Third. What may, for want of a better word, be termed 
"racial education," receives a greater stimulus in the country. 
This may, because of the uniformly poorer school facilities in the 
country, seem paradoxical, but racial education does not always 
begin with books. Dr. H. B. Frissell writes : * "We feel at Hamp- 
ton that the farm gives our students the best chance for improve- 
ment that they have, and it is a most excellent training school. 
Those who come to us, after helping their fathers and mothers 
to cultivate and pay for a small piece of land, have had a valua- 
ble experience not otherwise obtainable." It is these guiding 
principles which must be thoroughly ingrained into the nature of 
the race that have been termed racial education, and they are 
necessary before there can be any real adaption to new condi- 
tions. It was the long task of the Middle Ages to train the 
Teutons in the concept of authority that they might be prepared 
to receive the intellectual awakening of the Renaissance without 
overturning society. In a similar way the laws of racial develop- 
ment must work slowly to train the negroes in habits of thrift 
and industry ; such racial education has a better chance for growth 
in the country than in the city. 

This process is along the lines suggested by General Armstrong 
and developed at Hampton and Tuskegee ; it is the form of train- 



4. In a letter to the writer. 



102 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

ing which works toward the education of Huxley's definition — to 
bring man "in harmony with nature." Such a point of view 
takes the stand that knowledge is useless unless purposeful, and 
declares that the great end of life is action rather than knowl- 
edge per se. And yet this is clearly but a beginning; the train- 
ing, to be effective, must continue for a longer period than it 
is possible to give in a few brief years. The negro, like every- 
body else, will never be possessed of anything he does not achieve 
for himself; and if, with this kind of training, he builds where- 
ever his capabilities will carry him, he will have accomplished 
the end. 

Much of the negro's problem is educational: The crux of the 
educational problem is to lay the foundations firm in economic 
efficiency. 

The fourth and final advantage which may be mentioned is 
the economic. Without economic security the advantages ac- 
cruing to health, education, social conditions, and what not might 
be enumerated indefinitely but never with any degree of con- 
viction. Professor Sumner, says: 5 "We are told that moral 
forces alone can elevate any such people again. But it is plain 
that a people which has sunk below the reach of the economic 
forces of self-interest has certainly sunk below the reach of 
moral forces, and that this objection is superficial and short- 
sighted. What is true is that economic forces always go before 
moral forces. Men feel self-interest long before they feel pru- 
dence, self-control, and temperance. They lose the moral forces 
long before they lose the economic forces. If they can be re- 
generated at all it must be first by distress appealing to self-in- 
terest and forcing recourse to some expedient for relief. * * * 
The economic forces work with moral forces and are their hand- 
maids, but the economic forces are far more primitive, original, 
and universal. The glib generalities in which we sometimes hear 
people talk, as if you could set moral and economic forces sep- 
arate from and in antithesis to each other, and discard the one 
to accept and work by the other, gravely misconstrue the reali- 
ties of the social order." 



5. Sumner, "The Challenge of Facts and Other Essays" quoted in 
Keller, "Societal Evolution." 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 103 

This analysis of the forces of social progress is peculiarly apt 
in relation to the negro, because it is here, probably more than 
anywhere else, that students have missed the main point and 
have tried to find the solution of the race problem in forces other 
than the economic. But here, as elsewhere, the economic problem 
lies at the very heart of the welfare of the group, and its laws 
determine the course of the individuals ; all other social adjust- 
ments follow as its results. 

"Marginal productivity," economists tell us, "is partly deter- 
mined by the price which the entrepreneur has to pay for the 
services of the factors in production." Xow, the negro agricul- 
tural entrepreneur or farmer is, by being his own laborer, one of 
the factors in production, and since the cost of his standard of 
living is lower than that of the white he gains a differential ad- 
vantage over him up to but not beyond the point of diminishing 
efficiency. Or, as Professor Branson puts it, "Lower standards 
of living prevail over and gradually displace higher standards of 
living wherever the higher standards are weakened by luxurious 
wants and undefended by increasing energy and skill." This 
principle is less applicable in the cities than in the country, be- 
cause in the urban vocations the negro is less capable of compet- 
ing with the white, and because here his extravagance, for all 
practical purposes, raises his standard of living to near that of 
the whites. On the farms, however, it is different. 

The enormous gains in farm ownership that the negroes have 
made in recent years all over the South not only illustrate this 
principle, but show that the negroes are unconsciously taking ad- 
vantage of it. There is this, however, to be noted : other peo- 
ples, such as the Italians and other immigrants, are gradually 
coming South, and with their almost equally low standard of liv- 
ing and greater economic efficiency have an advantage over the 
negroes. If the negro, therefore, is to retain the economic ad- 
vantage as an agricultural worker that he now enjoys, his effici- 
ency must be maintained and increased. 

The negro's problem is essentially economic: It consists in 
maintaining, by increased efficiency, the advantage which he now 
enjoys in the rural districts. 



APPENDIX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY. 



APPENDIX. 



In compiling the following tables of statistics for Virginia by 
sections the counties of the state were arbitrarily divided into 
three groups as follows : 

Tidewater: Accomac, Alexandria, Caroline, Charles City, 
Elizabeth City, Essex, Fairfax, Greenesville, Gloucester, Isle of 
Wight, James City, King and Queen, King William, King 
George, Lancaster, Mathews, Middlesex, Nansemond, New 
Kent, Norfolk, Northampton, Northumberland, Stafford, Rich- 
mond, Prince William, Prince George, Princess Anne, South- 
ampton, Surrey, Sussex, Warwick, Westmoreland, and York. 

Piedmont: Albemarle, Amelia, Amherst, Appomattox, Bed- 
ford, Brunswick, Buckingham, Campbell, Charlotte, Chesterfield, 
Culpeper, Cumberland, Dinwiddie, Fluvanna, Franklin, Goochland, 
Halifax, Hanover, Greene, Henrico, Fauquier, Henry, Louisa, 
Lunenburg, Madison, Mecklenburg, Nelson, Nottoway, Orange, 
Patrick, Pittsylvania, Powhatan, Prince Edward, Rappahannock, 
and Spottsylvania. 

Valley and Southwest: Alleghany, Augusta, Bath, Bland, 
Botetourt, Buchanan, Carrol, Clark, Craig, Floyd, Frederick, 
Giles, Grayson, Highland, Lee, Loudoun, Montgomery, Page, 
Pulaski, Roanoke, Dickinson, Rockbridge, Rockingham, Russell, 
Scott, Shenandoah, Smythe, Tazewell, Warren, Washington, 
Wise, and Wythe. 

While it is impossible to put all of the counties in Virginia 
into one of these three groups without involving a certain amount 
of inaccuracy, it has been done here in order to make the tables 
complete for the state. In the final result there is no material 
difference, and it is convenient to consider the conditions in Vir- 
ginia as varying in these three sections. 

The figures for the first table were compiled from the Re- 
port of the Auditor of Public Accounts for 1914 and the Re- 

104 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 105 

port of the Virginia Tax Commission which based its estimate 
of the ratio between actual value and assessed value on an exam- 
ination of sale prices in the various counties. These computa- 
tions were made for each county and compiled into the table by 
sections. The figures for the second table were taken from the 
thirteenth census and the Auditor's Report and were compiled 
in the same manner. 

TABLE A: LAND VALUES BY SECTIONS AND RACES. 

Tidewater Piedmont Val. & S. W. 

Ass. value negro land & bldgs... $ 6,139,015 $ 7,634,131 $ 919,131 

Ass. value white land & bldgs... 56,560,543 78,471,144 80,436,301 

Ratio to true value 34% .".:.". 22.6% 

Est. true value negro land & bldgs. 18,055,926 23,856,659 4,064,287 

Est. true value white land & bldgs. 166,354,538 245,222,325 355,912,836 

Ass. value negro lots and imp... 1,873,945 879,099 564,949 

Ass. value white lots and imps.. 18,633,325 1S,588,161 16,996,805 

Ratio to true value 42.6% 43% 31% 

Est. true value negro lots and imps. 4,396,593 2,032,742 1,822,419 

Est. true value white lots and imps. 43,740,199 43,228,281 54,828,400 



TABLE B: POPULATION AND FARMS BY SECTIONS AND 

RACES. 

Tidewater Piedmont Val. & S W. 

White pop. 1910 226,846 

Negro pop. 1900 211,367 

Negro pop. 1910 221,387 

White farms 1910 26,887 

Negro farms 1910 18,654 

Negro owned acreage 1914 600,809 

White owned acreage 1914 4,635,184 

Negro owned farms in 1910 12,735 

% of negro farms op. by owners. 68.1% 



364,698 


518,818 


274,295 


61,939 


254,972 


54.555 


50,746 


58,122 


27,444 


1,993 


1,024,264 


65,561 


9,141,699 


8,034,745 


17,854 


1,616 


62.57o 


71% 



The whole of the Rivanna District, which extends north and 
east of Charlottesville some seventeen miles, was traversed by 
carriage. In these drives the homes of some three hundred ne- 
groes were seen and records were made, according to the fol- 
lowing schedule, for 103 families. These were picked from the 
different communities all over the district and include about the 



106 PHELPS-STOKES FELLOWSHIP PAPERS 

proper proportions for each class of negro family. The idea 
was to interview typical families in each class and the visits were 
made with this object in view. 

QUESTIONAIRE AND OBSERVATIONS. 
Economic: 

Black 

Name Age (about) Mulatto 

District Acres owned Rented 

Assessed Val Value based on 

sales Declared value Soil 

Fertilizer (any used and what kind) 

Type of neighboring white farms 

Any other means of support 

Any contribution by members of family 

Crop Diversification 

Tilable area Income : wages per day 

days worked sale price of crop 

total Expenditures: 

clothes food tobacco 

liquor church lodge 

patent medicines doctors bills 

fuel total Have you a bank 

account Where Any insurance 

Where do you buy what food 

quantities cash Do you 

borrow purpose security 

Live stock (what) Number 

Value Poultry 

Value Garden patch 

what raised Anything canned 

House rooms painted 

No. occupants furniture Outhouses 

What condition Fences 

Implements Satisfied with country life 

Children leaving 

Education: 

Can you read write What school did you 

attend Do children attend 

where Why not (if not) 

Do they attend regularly 

Grade Do you vote 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 107 



party What paper do you take 

Do you know any Hampton people . . . 

What do you think of them 



Health: 

Are you married, divorced, separated 

Number in family number children 

number children lost Diseases: tuberculosis 

typhoid fever Privy 

Who is your doctor 

Social and Religious: 

Do you belong to a church Denomination 

How many of family belong Do 

you attend How often Where 

Church sociables 

How often Preachers: (see some of them) 

Do you belong 

to a lodge Name of same 

Type: sick funeral death 

social life Am't of dues 

Am't of benefit 



BIBLIOGRAPHY. 

Barringer, P. B. 

"The American Xegro." An address delivered before the 
Tri-State Medical Society at Charleston, 1900. 

Brawley, B. G. 

"A Short History of the American Negro." 

Brooks, R. P. 

"A Local Study of the Race Problem." (Political Science 
Quarterly, 1911.) 

Bruce, P. A. 

"The Plantation Negro as a Free Man." 

Church, J. W. 

"The Halifax Plan for the Practical Education of the 
Negro." (Hampton Press, 1910.) 



108 phelps-stokes fellowship papers 

Davis, Jackson. 

"The Negro in Country Life." An address delivered be- 
fore the Rural Life Conference at the University of 
Virginia, 1911. 

DuBois, W. E. B. 

"The Negro Artisan" — (Atlanta University Publications.) 

"The Negroes of Farmville, Va." (Bulletin of the Depart- 
ment of Labor, No. 14.) 

"Negro Landholders of Georgia." (Bulletin of the Depart- 
ment of Labor, No. 35. ) 

"The Souls of the Black Folk." 

FlEmming, W. H. 

"Documentary History of the Reconstruction." 

Hammond, L. H. 

"In Black and White: An Interpretation of Southern Life." 

Hart, A. B. 

"The Southern South." 

"American History told by Contemporaries." 

Hill, W. B. 

"A Rural Survey of Clark County, Ga., with Special Refer- 
ence to the Negroes." (Phelps-Stokes Fellowship 
Studies No. 2 Bulletin of the University of Georgia.) 

Keller, A. G. 

"Societal Evolution." 

Kelsey, Carl. 

"The Negro Farmer." 

Murphy, E. G. 

"The Basis of Ascendency." 
"Problems of the Present South." 

Page, Thomas Nelson. 
"The Old Dominion." 
"The Negro: The Southerner's Problem." 

Patterson, 

"The Negro and His Needs." 



RURAL LAND OWNERSHIP 109 

Stone, A. H. 

"Studies in the American Race Problem." 

Thom, W. T. 

"The Negroes of Sandy Springs, Md." (Bulletin of the 
Department of Labor, Xo. 32.) 

"The Negroes of Litwalton, Ya." (Bulletin of the Depart- 
ment of Labor, No. 37. ) 

Tillinghast, J. A. 

"The Negro in Africa and America." ( Publications of the 

American Economic Association, 1902. ) 
"The South in the Building of the Nation" — articles by 
Flemming, Parker, Clark and Jacobson. 

Washington, Booker T. 

"The Future of the American Negro." 

"Up From Slavery." 

"The Story of the Negro." 

"The Negro in the South" (joint author with DuBois.) 

Walker, T. C. 

"Negro Property Holding in Tidewater Virginia." (Annals 
the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, 
1913.) 

Weatherford, W. D. 

"Negro Life in the South." 
"Present Forces in Negro Progress." 

Williams, W. T. B. 

"Local Conditions Among Negroes." (Hampton Press, 
1906.) 

Woods, Edgar. 

"History of Albemarle." 

WoOFTER, J. T. 

"The Negroes of Athens, Ga." ( Phelps-Stokes Fellowship 
Studies No. 1, Bulletin of the University of Georgia.) 

Work, Monroe N. 

"Negro Year Book, 1914-15." 



110 phelps-stokes fellowship papers 

Reports of the Census Bureau. 

"The Southern Workman" — files in the Library of the Uni- 
versity of Virginia. 

Report of the State Auditor of Public Accounts, 1914. 

Report of the Virginia Tax Commission, 1914. 

Handbook of the Virginia Department of Health. 

Year Books of the Virginia Department of Agriculture. 

Reports of the Slater and Jeannes Funds. 

Reports of the Hampton Xegro Conferences 1898-1911. 



The Michie Company, Printers 
Charlottesville, Virginia 



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